The case of the trooper to whose memory the work is dedicated excited a good deal of interest at the time. He had a fit of jealousy, murdered his sweetheart, and though public opinion was inclined to take a merciful view of the crime, and a petition was presented to the Home Secretary for the withdrawal of the capital sentence, it was without effect, and the extreme penalty of the law was carried out in the Gaol at Reading.
The first line—
"He did not wear his scarlet coat"—
rivets the attention at once, and as surely as do the opening lines of "The Ancient Mariner." The reason for this is given at once—
"For wine and blood are red
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead."
That the whole incident that led to the man's being there should be communicated in the very first stanza, to make that stanza complete, is an artistic necessity, and in the next two lines we are told who the victim is—
"The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed."
The tragedy is complete. We have the picture of the soldier deprived of his uniform and the whole story is revealed to us. A more concise or supremely reticent description of the pathetic drama there could not be. But the picture must be filled in even to the most trivial detail, and we see the poor wretch taking his daily exercise among the prisoners awaiting their trial, attired in "a suit of shabby grey," trying to demean himself like a man and, trivial, but, from the artist's point of view, important detail, with a cricket cap on his head. There is a world of pathos and lines of unspoken tragedy in that cricket cap worn by a man whose days are numbered, who never will play a game again and whose mind must be occupied with thoughts far removed from sport and amusement save perhaps when they may revert to happy days spent with bat and ball, and which will never recur again. But though his step be jaunty, the oppression of his impending doom is on him,
"I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day."
We can see that prison yard, the circle of convicts pacing the melancholy round at ordered intervals and with measured tread, and the strong man, full of life and vigour looking up at God's blue sky and drinking in the air with greedy lungs. We can see the author of the poem, the erstwhile social favourite, in his convict garb walking