At Naples he replaced it. He admits, in a letter to Mr. Ross, that "the poetry is not good," and says, "I have put 'The Governor was strict upon the Regulation Act'--I now think that strong is better. The verse is meant to be colloquial--G. R. Sims at best--and when one is going for a coarse effect, one had better be coarse. So please restore 'strong.'" I think that nothing could more clearly illustrate the difference between Wilde as artist before and after he was released. The change was radical, and appeared not only in the medium of his work but in its intention. He had once said that nothing was sadder in the history of literature than the career of Charles Reade, who, after writing "The Cloister and the Hearth," "wasted the rest of his life in a foolish attempt to be modern, to draw public attention to the state of our convict prisons." Now, he cheerfully labelled his ballad, "Poetry and Propaganda," and admitted that though the poem should end with the fifth canto, he had something to say and must therefore go on a little longer. He had once written for his own admiration, and, to his disadvantage, for that of people he might meet at dinner. He now wished to publish his ballad in one of the more widely read newspapers, to reach the sort of people who had shared his life in gaol. He had become anxious to speak and to be heard, and was no longer content to make and to be admired. Little trace of the friction of change is left in the poem. It is true that in certain lights a reader may perceive that he is examining a palimpsest, and wonder what manner of writer he was whose writing is obliterated. But there is an energy in the ballad that swings even the more obvious propaganda into the powerful motion of the poetry. Nowhere else in Wilde's work is there such a feeling of tense muscles, of difficult, because passionate, articulation. And this was the effect that he was willing to achieve. The blemishes on the poem, its moments of bad verse, its metaphors only half conceived (like the filling of an urn that has long been broken) scarcely mar the impression. It is felt that a relaxed watchfulness is due to the effort of reticence. I know of no other poem that so intensifies our horror of mortality. Beside it Wordsworth's sonnets on Capital Punishment debate with aloof, respectable philosophy the expediency of taking blood for blood, and suggest the palliatives with which a tender heart may soothe the pain of its acquiescence. Even Villon, who, like Wilde, had been in prison, and, unlike Wilde, had been himself under sentence of death, is infinitely less actual. He sees only after death: the gibbet, the row of corpses, their heads hanging, the eyes picked from their sockets by the crows, a row of blackened, sun-dried bodies swinging in wind and rain. He sees that, and thinks it a pitiful spectacle, but his only prayer is "qu'enfer n'ayt de nous la maistrie!" For Wilde it is life that matters.