Rudyard Kipling: Selected Poems Read online

  PENGUIN ENGLISH POETS

  GENERAL EDITOR: CHRISTOPHER RICKS

  RUDYARD KIPLING: SELECTED POEMS

  RUDYARD JOSEPH KIPLING was born in Bombay in 1865. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was the author and illustrator of Beast and Man in India, and his mother, Alice, was the sister of Lady Burne-Jones. In 1871 Kipling was brought home from India and spent five unhappy years with a foster family in Southsea, an experience he later drew on in The Light that Failed (1891). The years he spent at the United Services College, a school for officers’ children, are depicted in Stalky & Co. (1899) and the character of Beetle is something of a self-portrait. It was during his time at the college that he began writing poetry and Schoolboy Lyrics was published privately in 1881. In the following year he started work as a journalist in India, and while there produced a body of work, stories, sketches and poems – notably Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) – which made him an instant literary celebrity when he returned to England in 1889. Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) contains some of his most popular pieces, including ‘Mandalay’, ‘Gunga Din’ and ‘Danny Deever’. In this collection Kipling experimented with form and dialect, notably the cockney accent of the soldier poems, but the influence of hymns, music-hall songs, ballads and public poetry can be found throughout his verse.

  In 1892 he married an American, Caroline Balestier, and from 1892 to 1896 they lived in Vermont, where Kipling wrote The Jungle Book, published in 1894. In 1901 came Kim and in 1902 the Just So Stories. Tales of every kind – including historical and science fiction – continued to flow from his pen but Kim is generally thought to be his greatest long work, putting him high among the chroniclers of British expansion.

  From 1902 Kipling made his home in Sussex, but he continued to travel widely and caught his first glimpse of warfare in South Africa, where he wrote some excellent reportage on the Boer War. However, many of the views he expressed were rejected by anti-imperialists who accused him of jingoism and love of violence. Though rich and successful, he never again enjoyed the literary esteem of his early years. With the onset of the Great War his work became a great deal more sombre. The stories he subsequently wrote, A Diversity of Creatures (1917), Debits and Credits (1926) and Limits and Renewals (1932), are now thought by many to contain some of his finest writing. The death of his only son in 1915 also contributed to a new inwardness of vision. Kipling refused to accept the role of Poet Laureate and other civil honours, but he was the first English writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1907. He died in 1936 and his autobiographical fragment Something of Myself was published the following year.

  PETER KEATING was Reader in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh until 1990 when he retired to become a full-time writer. His publications include The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction, Into Unknown England, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914, which received a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, and Kipling the Poet. He has also edited Matthew Arnold’s Selected Prose and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford/Cousin Phillis for Penguin Classics.

  The Kipling Society, founded in 1927, is a literary society for all who enjoy the prose and poetry of Rudyard Kipling. For inquiries, write to The Honorary Secretary, 6 Clifton Road, London W9 1SS.

  Rudyard Kipling

  Selected Poems

  Edited by PETER KEATING

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 1993

  Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2000

  Selection, preface and notes copyright © Peter Keating, 1993

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the editor has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-141-92216-4

  Contents

  Preface

  Table of Dates

  Further Reading

  ‘We are very slightly changed’

  The Undertaker’s Horse

  The Story of Uriah

  Public Waste

  The Plea of the Simla Dancers

  The Lovers’ Litany

  The Overland Mail

  Christmas in India

  ‘Look, you have cast out Love!’

  ‘A stone’s throw out on either hand’

  The Betrothed

  The Winners

  ‘I have eaten your bread and salt’

  Danny Deever

  Tommy

  Private Ortheris’s Song

  Soldier, Soldier

  The Widow at Windsor

  Gunga Din

  Mandalay

  The Young British Soldier

  The Conundrum of the Workshops

  ‘Ford o’ Kabul River’

  The English Flag

  ‘The beasts are very wise’

  Cells

  The Widow’s Party

  The Exiles’ Line

  When Earth’s Last Picture is Painted

  In the Neolithic Age

  The Last Chantey

  ‘For to Admire’

  The Law of the Jungle

  The Three-Decker

  ‘Back to the Army Again’

  Road-Song of the Bandar-Log

  McAndrew’s Hymn

  ‘The Men that fought at Minden’

  ‘The stream is shrunk – the pool is dry’

  ‘The ’Eathen’

  The King

  The Derelict

  ‘When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre’

  The Ladies

  The Sergeant’s Weddin’

  The Vampire

  Recessional

  The White Man’s Burden

  Cruisers

  A School Song

  The Absent-Minded Beggar

  The Two-Sided Man

  Bridge-Guard in the Karroo

  The Lesson

  The Islanders

  ‘The Camel’s hump is an ugly lump’

  ‘I keep six honest serving-men’

  ‘I’ve never sailed the Amazon’

  ‘Pussy can sit by the fire and sing’

  The Settler

  ‘Before a midnight breaks in storm’

  The Second Voyage

  The Broken Men

  Sussex

  Dirge of Dead Sisters

  Chant-Pagan

  Lichtenberg

  Stellenbosch

  Harp Song of the Dane Women

  ‘Rimini’

  Prophets at Home

  A Smuggler’s Song

  The Sons of Martha

  A Song of Travel

  ‘The Power of the Dog’

  The Puzzler
r />   The Rabbi’s Song

  A Charm

  Cold Iron

  The Looking-Glass

  The Way through the Woods

  If –

  ‘Poor Honest Men’

  ‘Our Fathers of Old’

  The Declaration of London

  The Female of the Species

  The River’s Tale

  The Roman Centurion’s Song

  Dane-Geld

  The French Wars

  The Glory of the Garden

  ‘For All We Have and Are’

  Mine Sweepers

  ‘Tin Fish’

  ‘The Trade’

  ‘My Boy Jack’

  The Question

  Mesopotamia

  The Holy War

  Jobson’s Amen

  The Fabulists

  Justice

  The Hyaenas

  En-Dor

  Gethsemane

  The Craftsman

  The Benefactors

  Natural Theology

  Epitaphs of the War

  ‘Equality of Sacrifice’

  A Servant

  A Son

  An Only Son

  Ex-Clerk

  The Wonder

  Hindu Sepoy in France

  The Coward

  Shock

  A Grave near Cairo

  Pelicans in the Wilderness

  ‘Canadians’

  Inscription on Memorial in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario

  The Favour

  The Beginner

  R.A.F. (Aged Eighteen)

  The Refined Man

  Native Water-Carrier (M.E.F.)

  Bombed in London

  The Sleepy Sentinel

  Batteries out of Ammunition

  Common Form

  A Dead Statesman

  The Rebel

  The Obedient

  A Drifter off Tarentum

  Destroyers in Collision

  Convoy Escort

  Unknown Female Corpse

  Raped and Revenged

  Salonikan Grave

  The Bridegroom

  V.A.D. (Mediterranean)

  Actors

  Journalists

  The Gods of the Copybook Headings

  The Clerks and the Bells

  Lollius

  London Stone

  Doctors

  Chartres Windows

  The Changelings

  Gipsy Vans

  A Legend of Truth

  We and They

  Untimely

  A Rector’s Memory

  Memories

  Gertrude’s Prayer

  Four-Feet

  The Disciple

  The Threshold

  The Expert

  The Storm Cone

  The Bonfires

  The Appeal

  Notes

  Index of Titles

  Index of First Lines

  Preface

  Kipling began writing poetry, or ‘verse’ as he was always to call it, as a young child. While a schoolboy at the United Services College he contributed poems regularly to the college magazine, which he also edited. In 1881, when he was sixteen years old and still at school, his parents in India arranged, without consulting him, for the publication of a collection of his poems which they called Schoolboy Lyrics. The following year he joined his parents in India, taking a job as assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore. During the seven years he spent working for the Gazette, and for its sister paper the Pioneer in Allahabad, he wrote and published, in addition to his day-by-day journalism, an enormous number of stories and poems. He also collaborated with his family in the publication of two slim volumes – Echoes (1884), a collection of verse parodies written with his sister Trix, and Quartette (1885), a Christmas annual to which all four members of the family contributed. Some of the poetry written at school and in India Kipling reprinted in later editions of his work, but the greater part of it he left uncollected. It has recently been gathered together and valuably edited by Andrew Rutherford as Early Verse by Rudyard Kipling 1879–1889 (Oxford, 1986).

  The first volume of his own poetry that Kipling himself authorized was Departmental Ditties (Lahore, 1886). This was followed, at distinct points in his career, by Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (1892), The Seven Seas (1896), The Five Nations (1903) and The Years Between (1919). All five books contained new poems collected together with poems which had already appeared in newspapers and magazines, sometimes many years earlier. Whether new or reprinted, these poems were by no means the whole of his poetic output.

  From the beginning of his public career as a writer Kipling experimented with the linking together of poetry and prose. Sometimes this took the simple form of a few lines of poetry serving as an epigraph to a story; at other times, a poem, song, or ballad within a story; or, increasingly, poems which framed and commented on the story. Many of his books which are thought of habitually as volumes of short stories are, in fact, combinations of stories and poems. Very often the story as originally published in a magazine did not carry the poems with it: these were added when the story was collected with others for book publication. In such cases the publication dates of prose and poetry may be quite different, and, unless external evidence is available, the poems’ dates of composition difficult to fix. Furthermore, when reprinting these particular poems, Kipling did not include them in his other volumes of poetry but collected them in a separate volume called Songs from Books (1913), with many of the poems expanded or rewritten.

  There were also poems which Kipling did not choose, for one reason or another, to reprint or collect immediately: political satire published in newspapers; a few lines of poetry accompanying travel articles; poems already reprinted without his permission by American ‘pirates’; contributions to books by other authors and to various fund-raising organizations; and poems written specifically for clearly defined separate publication, the most important instance of this being the twenty-three poems he contributed to C.R.L. Fletcher’s A History of England (1911). As editions and selections of his poetry multiplied haphazardly in Britain and America (including a misleadingly titled Collected Verse of Rudyard Kipling in 1912), it became clear that a reliable, easily accessible collected edition was badly needed. The result was Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Inclusive Edition 1885–1918, published by Hodder & Stoughton in three volumes in 1919, and in a single volume two years later. Far from clarifying the situation, it added to the confusion in ways that have affected Kipling’s reputation down to the present day.

  It did not much matter that this Inclusive Edition was not actually ‘inclusive’, or that it carried no editorial explanation or guidance: the textual authority of the individual poems was generally reliable, and that seems to have been Kipling’s main concern. The problem lies in the way the poems were arranged. It is probable that Kipling intended initially to order the poems chronologically, beginning with Departmental Ditties, but soon changed his mind and started to group poems according to subject. Neither policy was followed through: if there was once a consistent editorial policy it is no longer discernible. Early and late poems are placed close together, Boer War poems are linked with First World War poems, and blocks of ‘songs’ and epigraphs from the prose works are inserted arbitrarily. To give some semblance of order, dates were placed beneath the titles of many of the poems, but these dates may refer to the subject of a particular poem, or its original publication, or its composition, and very often there is no indication which meaning is intended. The Inclusive Edition was reprinted in 1927 and 1933, each time with new poems added. In 1940, four years after Kipling’s death, yet more poems were included and the title of the volume changed to the Definitive Edition. It has been reprinted in that form ever since.

  During the final years of his life Kipling revised all his published works for the Sussex Edition (35 vols, 1937–9). The poetry was grouped according to the volumes in which it had been collected originally, with the ‘songs from books’ expan
ded and placed in a separate section, and other poems placed under the heading ‘Miscellaneous’. Unfortunately the Sussex was a limited, expensive publication, and it was the bulky, chaotically organized, one-volume Definitive Edition that remained readily available in print. For the reader who, having enjoyed, say, Barrack-Room Ballads or the poems in Puck of Pook’s Hill, wished to read further in Kipling’s poetry, the Definitive Edition will often have acted as a disincentive. And, because of the special authority the Definitive seemed to carry, it tended to affect Kipling’s reputation as a poet in other ways as well. By far the most influential volume of the poetry published in the last fifty years has been T.S. Eliot’s A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1941). The essay on Kipling which prefaced the selection is justly celebrated, but in putting the poems together Eliot followed the order laid down by the Definitive Edition and in doing so encouraged the misleading view that there is little change or development in Kipling’s poetry.

  The present edition contains something like a quarter of the poetry that Kipling published in his lifetime. I have selected poems from every phase of Kipling’s career, starting with Departmental Ditties. I have included none of his juvenilia and none of the poems written in India which he himself decided not to select for Departmental Ditties: all of these are conveniently available in Andrew Rutherford’s edition Early Verse. The poems are arranged in chronological order, based on the date of their first publication rather than their date of composition which, as already mentioned, is often difficult to establish. On the few occasions where I have felt it sensible slightly to alter the chronology or where there is doubt about what exactly constitutes a poem’s first publication, details are given in the Notes.

  I have used the Definitive Edition as my basic text, though I have also taken into account Kipling’s later revisions for the Sussex. As far as the poems in this selection are concerned, those revisions were largely a matter of modernizing punctuation and standardizing certain usages which were always of importance to Kipling, notably the use and misuse of aspirates and his idiosyncratic addiction to capital letters. Changes such as these have been incorporated silently in the text. The dates Kipling appended to poems have often been rendered unnecessary by the chronological nature of the present edition, but where I have felt that the date is, or has become, part of the poem, then it has been retained. The occasional footnotes, presumably by Kipling, which have long been familiar to readers of the Definitive Edition have been transferred to the Notes.