Prisoner and Poet
Reed may have been a haunted convict, but his mastery of metaphor and the figurative expression of the mundane often makes him seem more like the writer of haunting verse. Indeed, at times, one’s credulity cannot help be stretched at the insistence the words are all his own:
“One spring morning—and, how, how fair or spring mornings, bursting on the sober face like a coquettish laugh of a beautiful woman, short but delicious”
Drunkenness
Reed reveals he is in possession of that rarest of literary gifts; one that so under the influence themselves believe they possess, but just as rarely do. That is the ability to turn his metaphorical gaze upon even the most unaesthetic and mundane of vices and transform it into portrait painted with words as he looks upon a poor, unfortunate drunk:
“What young man is that that has been playing with wine until it has mocked him and made a fool of him?”
The Graveyard
Moving his gaze from sunrise to the lush in his cups to the next obvious destination (though not in order) it is clear to see that few things on earth whether beautiful or ugly are not undeserving of the full cast of the author’s literary gaze. Just as he can turn morning into beautiful woman and make a drunk interesting, so the graveyard even come to life. It is almost enough to make one long for the cemetery and what some poetic voice might say about them:
“While the feet of the traveler has trampled o'er his grave, unmind of who the slumber is that lies beneath his feet, the cold winter winds are howling and playing o’er his grave, yet there he lays, unmindful of those northern blasts that come whistling o’er his tomb.”
The Chaplain
With a literary voice that transform a simple prisoner minister into a combination of light-winged angel and circus strongman, it is interesting to imagine what Reed might have done had he been given genuine muses as inspiration:
“As the Chaplain stood in front of my iron grated door, he seemed to me like a new born angel, sent from the portals of the sky to come and unlock the prisoner’s door”
The Inmate’s Prayer
If there is not already such a thing as the inmate’s prayer—that universal cry to the heavens for the day of justice to come their way even if only in the afterlife—then the words written down very close to end of the story should be considered. It is a metaphorical glimpse into what might just be the only thoughts that occasionally keep an untold number of prisoners just this side of madness:
“In that day when God shall send his holy angel, who shall swear in his name louder than a bellow of thunder that time is no more, then will I haunt the tyrants before the throne of God how has lock me in a gloomy dungeon.”
