Kipling… is the most inscrutable of authors. An immense gift for using words, an amazing curiosity and power of observation with his mind and with all his senses, the mask of the entertainer, and beyond that a queer gift of second sight, of transmitting messages from elsewhere, a gift so disconcerting when we are made aware of it that thenceforth we are never sure when it is not present: all this makes Kipling a writer impossible wholly to understand and quite impossible to belittle.
There are a number of paperback selections of Kipling’s poetry in print, which all include a more or less similar selection from the 350 or so poems he published, certainly all including the 20 or 30 greatest hits. This selection, for example, includes 123 poems – but what really distinguishes it is the magisterial introductory essay by the dean of Modern poetry, Thomas Stearns Eliot.
It’s a long and densely argued essay that is sometimes difficult to follow, but it is packed with fascinating insights.
Poetry and prose inseparable Kipling’s verse and prose are inseparable halves of the same achievement. ‘We must finally judge him, not separately as a poet and as a writer of prose fiction, but as the inventor of a mixed form.’ This is certainly the case in the volumes I’ve read recently, in the stories from Puck of Pook’s Hill onwards through to Debits and Credits, where every story is introduced or followed by a poem which comments on the characters and actions, shedding new light, modifying, deepening or perplexing our response.
Common criticisms
Eliot lists the common criticisms of Kipling:
Superficial jingles Most critics have to defend modern poetry from charges of obscurity; the critic writing about Kipling has to defend him from charges of ‘excessive lucidity’. We have to defend Kipling against the charge of being a journalist, writing for the lowest common denominator, against the charge that he wrote catchy superficial ‘jingles’. And yet there is no doubt that real deeps of poetry are sounded in many of his poems.
Topicality A further obstacle is Kipling’s poems’ topicality. So many of them are written a) for very specific occasions and b) from a political point of view which hardly anyone sympathises with nowadays. Personally, I have found occasional and political poetry to be an acquired taste. When I was young I liked emotional or rhetorical or dramatic poetry which spoke to my emotions. It was only in middle age that I tried Dryden again and realised, to my surprise that, once I fully understood the political background to his satires, I enjoyed their craft and wit and appropriateness. Same with Kipling. And in fact, as Eliot points out, the gift of being able to write really good occasional verse – i.e. verse directly speaking to a current event – and to do it to order, ‘is a very rare gift indeed’.
Similarly, both good epigrams and good hymns are very rare, and Kipling produced fine examples of both.
Imperialism Kipling thought the British Empire was a good thing. He thought the British had a unique ability to rule other peoples wisely and fairly. (And a comparison with the alternatives – with the Belgian or French or Spanish or Portuguese or German empires of the period – does tend to support this view; let alone a comparison with the alternatives of the Nazi Empire and the Soviet Empire, which grew up between the wars.)
But, contrary to the uninformed view that he is a prophet of Empire, his early stories are almost entirely satires on the greed, stupidity and snobbery of the British; throughout his prose runs blistering criticism of British politicians; and stories and poems alike from the Boer War onwards lament in graphic terms England’s failure to live up to her own best ideals.
The most notoriously imperial poems are less hymns to any kind of racial or cultural superiority, but rather calls to duty and responsibility. He explicitly condemns the mercantile parties (in Britain and America) who used the high ideals of empire as a fig leaf for rapacious exploitation.
Racism I find Kipling’s casual contempt for some Indian natives (as for many of the women) in his early stories revolting. But there is a good deal of evidence that he was in fact surprisingly tolerant for his time. The prime exhibit is Kim, his best book and one of the best English fictions to come out of the Raj, in which all the most sympathetic and real characters are Indian: the Lama, Mahbub Ali, Hurree Chunder Mookerjee and the widow. One of his most famous poems is Gunga Din in which the Indian is, quite simply, declared a better man than the narrator. He treats the multiple religions of India with equal respect or satire, depending on the context.
Kipling wrote a lot and his attitudes – or the attitudes of his narrators and characters – are mixed and contradictory. But one consistent worldview that the white man, the Englishman, is always and everywhere innately superior to the inferior races – is not there in his writings. He believed that white Western culture had a responsibility to bring the benefits of civilisation – law, schools, hospitals, railways, roads – to the developing world, and so spoke about the White Man’s Burden to do all this – and lamented the resentful ingratitude of the recipients, and the relentless criticism of anti-imperialists at home. But:
a) The era of empires and colonies is over – India and Pakistan will soon have been completely independent for 70 years – and so Kipling’s views have receded to become just the most forcefully expressed of a whole range of opinion from a period which historians can investigate and the literary reader can imaginatively inhabit, as I inhabit the mind of a 17th century French Catholic courtier when I read Racine or a medieval monk when I read Chaucer.
b) Throughout the month that I’ve been soaking myself in Kipling – with his relentless rhetoric about the responsibility of the ‘White Man’ to help the rest of the world – I have also been opening newspapers and hearing on the radio relentless calls for ‘the West’ to intervene in the bombing of Aleppo or do more about the refugee crisis, or intervene in Yemeni civil war. If you replace ‘white man’ in his poems with ‘the West’ you’ll see that a lot of the same paternalistic attitude lives on, even in self-proclaimed liberals and anti-imperialists: there is still the assumption that we in ‘the West’ must do something, are somehow responsible, somehow have magic powers to sort out the world’s troubles which (it is implied) the poor benighted inhabitants of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia and all the rest of them lack.
In other words, although all right-thinking contemporary liberals decry Kipling’s patronising racism, or the paternalistic implications of his belief that the ‘White Man’ has some kind of responsibility to guide and help and save the rest of the world, I am struck by how much the same attitude of paternalism is alive and kicking in the same liberal minds.
Anyway, you only have to compare Kipling’s thoroughly articulated view that the White Man’s burden is to help and raise up the peoples he finds himself set over, with something like the Nazi doctrine of the innate superiority of the Aryan race, which saw every example of every other race as genetically inferior and only fit to be used as slaves or to carry out live experiments on – to realise the difference. Set against the Nazis, Kipling’s work overflows with sympathy for all types of native peoples – Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists – and with numerous narratives where the ‘native’ turns out to be the equal of or, quite often, a better person than the struggling white man.
Professionalism Eliot draws attention to Kipling’s professionalism – an aspect of his work which I also find admirable:
No writer has ever cared more for the craft of words than Kipling… We can only say that Kipling’s craftsmanship is more reliable than that of some greater poets, and that there is hardly any poem, even in the collected works, in which he fails to do what he has set out to do.
As Eliot points out, quite a few of the stories, particularly the later stories, refer to art and, specifically, to the redeeming element of craft, craftsmanship, the skill and dedication involved in making something. In this respect Kipling is more like the engineers he venerated – building useable structures for specific purposes – than the lyric poet of popular mythology, wanly waiting on inspiration from the Muse. (As Eliot points out, for both Dryden and Kipling, ‘wisdom has the primacy over inspiration’.)
Lack of psychology But this very facility lends itself to a further criticism, that it was in some sense too easy for Kipling; or, put another way, that his verse never feels as if it comes from the kind of psychological depths or offers the kind of personal, intimate or psychological insights which the post-Romantic reader is used to. We like to feel that a writer is in some sense compelled to write what and how he did. Eliot contrasts Kipling with Yeats, whose career included all kinds of compulsions – political, personal, social, romantic – and is often compelling because of it. Almost all Yeats’s poetry is lyrical in the sense that it is designed to arouse feeling. Kipling is the opposite. He is more like Dryden; both writers used poetry ‘to convey a simple forceful statement, rather than a musical pattern of emotional overtones’. His poetry might arise out of some particularly effective statement, but it is statement first and foremost, with almost no emotion or psychology.
In this respect, then, the objectivity of the ballad form suits the objectivity of his approach. For no other writer of comparable stature is there less sense of ‘this inner compulsion’, less sense that he had to write what he wrote. The majority of Kipling’s output derives from skilful craft and a facility in writing in all kinds of forms, a kind of impersonality, which many modern readers of poetry don’t find sympathetic.
Kipling is the most elusive of subjects: no writer has been more reticent about himself, or given fewer openings for curiosity.
Many types of literary criticism are essentially biographical in that they set out to show how an author developed, working with changing material and experiences, learning how to shape and deploy them over the course of their career etc. But this entire critical approach doesn’t work for Kipling, who is skilled and adept right from the start, who shows equal and astonishing fluency with whatever he turns his hand to, and whose oeuvre shows next to no personal or biographical content. The opposite.
Ballads This craftsmanship is exemplified in the form most identified with Kipling. Eliot dwells at length on the fact that Kipling wrote ballads – he wrote in more forms than the symmetrical rhyming ballad, but he was always driven by what Eliot calls ‘the ballad motive’. Eliot gives a brief history of the ballad, pointing out that a good ballad can appeal to both the uneducated and the highly educated, and then going on to praise Kipling’s mastery of the form:
- ‘a consummate gift of word, phrase and rhythm’
- ‘the variety of form which Kipling manages to devise for his ballads is remarkable: each is distinct, and perfectly fitted to the content and mood which the poem has to convey’
Eliot goes on to make the distinction between poets like himself, whose aim is to make something which will be and, as an evocative object, evoke a range of responses in different readers; and Kipling’s poems which are designed to act – designed to elicit exactly the same response in all its readers.
Poetry or verse? Eliot tackles the tricky subject of whether Kipling’s work is verse or poetry. I think he’s saying that most of it is verse (hence the title of this book), but that ‘poetry’ frequently arises within it.
With Kipling you cannot draw a line beyond which some of the verse becomes ‘poetry’; … the poetry when it comes, owes the gravity of its impact to being something over and above the bargain, something more than the writer undertook to give you.
Possessed Eliot makes the point that, completely contrary to his reputation as a blustering racist imperialist, there are in fact strange, really strange and eerie depths, hints of terrible psychological experiences, found in much of his work. (I’ve commented on this uncanny element in my review of a collection of his ghost and horror stories – Strange Tales – which in fact, far from depicting heroic chaps running a gleamingly efficient Empire, give a consistent sense of very ordinary men stretched to the limit by difficult work in impossible conditions and teetering on the verge of complete nervous and psychological collapse.)
But it isn’t just stress and collapse. Quite regularly something deeper, a sense of strange historical or even mythical depths, stirs in his work.
At times Kipling is not merely possessed of penetration, but also ‘possessed’ of a kind of second sight.
Hence Eliot is able to say that in a hymn-like poem written for a very public occasion, like Recessional:
Something breaks through from a deeper level than that of the mind of the conscious observer of political and social affairs – something which has the true prophetic inspiration.
Verse or poetry?
Put simply, Kipling was capable of fluently writing verse for all occasions, which generally eschews all psychology, and certainly all autobiographical content, in order to put into objective ballad formats the catchy formulation of popular or common sentiments; but his sheer facility of phrasing and rhythm often lends this ‘verse’ a kind of depth which justifies the name of ‘poetry’.
I have been using the term ‘verse’ with his own authority, because that is what he called it himself. There is poetry in it; but when he writes verse that is not poetry it is not because he has tried to write poetry and failed. He had another purpose, and one to which he adhered with integrity.
Towards the end of the essay Eliot returns to the question.
What fundamentally differentiates his ‘verse’ from ‘poetry’ is the subordination of musical interest… There is a harmonics of poetry which is not merely beyond their range – it would interfere with their intention.
In other words Kipling wasn’t trying to write poetry, he was aiming at verse and he did write a good deal of truly great verse – but from that verse, from time to time, both true deep memorable poetry emerges, and also profound prophetic truths are articulated.
Five sample poems
I’ve selected five Kipling poems designed to give a sense of his variety of style, mood and subject matter: an example of the Ballad-Room Ballads which were such a popular success in the early 1890s demonstrates the young man’s bumptious good humour; one of the many poems which reveals the eerie, science-fiction-ish, visionary side of Kipling’s imagination; his most famous ‘hymn, with its Biblical imagery and refrain; an eerie moving poem about the Great War; and a compressed, bitter epigram from the same conflict.
1. Fuzzy-Wuzzy (1890)
A tribute to the bravery of the Sudanese warriors who the British Army faced in their campaign against the forces of ‘the Mahdi’ in the Sudan in 1884-85, in the Army’s march south to rescue General Gordon and his Egyptian garrison besieged in Khartoum. It includes a list of recent British military defeats, is a tribute to the superior fighting qualities of the black man, all told in high good humour as Kipling enjoys deploying outrageous rhymes and rhythms, an enjoyment which is still infectious.
We’ve fought with many men acrost the seas,
An’ some of ’em was brave an’ some was not:
The Paythan an’ the Zulu an’ Burmese;
But the Fuzzy was the finest o’ the lot.
We never got a ha’porth’s change of ‘im:
‘E squatted in the scrub an’ ‘ocked our ‘orses,
‘E cut our sentries up at Suakim,
An’ ‘e played the cat an’ banjo with our forces.
So ‘ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your ‘ome in the Soudan;
You’re a pore benighted ‘eathen but a first-class fightin’ man;
We gives you your certificate, an’ if you want it signed
We’ll come an’ ‘ave a romp with you whenever you’re inclined.
We took our chanst among the Khyber ‘ills,
The Boers knocked us silly at a mile,
The Burman give us Irriwaddy chills,
An’ a Zulu impi dished us up in style:
But all we ever got from such as they
Was pop to what the Fuzzy made us swaller;
We ‘eld our bloomin’ own, the papers say,
But man for man the Fuzzy knocked us ‘oller.
Then ‘ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an’ the missis and the kid;
Our orders was to break you, an’ of course we went an’ did.
We sloshed you with Martinis, an’ it wasn’t ‘ardly fair;
But for all the odds agin’ you, Fuzzy-Wuz, you broke the square.
‘E ‘asn’t got no papers of ‘is own,
‘E ‘asn’t got no medals nor rewards,
So we must certify the skill ‘e’s shown
In usin’ of ‘is long two-‘anded swords:
When ‘e’s ‘oppin’ in an’ out among the bush
With ‘is coffin-‘eaded shield an’ shovel-spear,
An ‘appy day with Fuzzy on the rush
Will last an ‘ealthy Tommy for a year.
So ‘ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an’ your friends which are no more,
If we ‘adn’t lost some messmates we would ‘elp you to deplore.
But give an’ take’s the gospel, an’ we’ll call the bargain fair,
For if you ‘ave lost more than us, you crumpled up the square!
‘E rushes at the smoke when we let drive,
An’, before we know, ‘e’s ‘ackin’ at our ‘ead;
‘E’s all ‘ot sand an’ ginger when alive,
An’ ‘e’s generally shammin’ when ‘e’s dead.
‘E’s a daisy, ‘e’s a ducky, ‘e’s a lamb!
‘E’s a injia-rubber idiot on the spree,
‘E’s the on’y thing that doesn’t give a damn
For a Regiment o’ British Infantree!
So ‘ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your ‘ome in the Soudan;
You’re a pore benighted ‘eathen but a first-class fightin’ man;
An’ ‘ere’s to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your ‘ayrick ‘ead of ‘air —
You big black boundin’ beggar — for you broke a British square!
2. The Deep-Sea Cables (1893)
Part of a longer sequence Kipling called A Song of the English which describes various aspects of British naval and maritime supremacy. It describes the advent of cables laid on the ocean beds to carry telegraphic messages. At a stroke the continents of the world were united and messages which used to take months to travel from India or Australia to London could now be sent almost instantaneously. Hence the line ‘they have killed their father Time’. The poem is both an example of Kipling’s obsession with new technology, and his ability to make that technology glamorous and romantic; and at the same time hints at the occasional weirdness of his imagination, broaching on the territory of H.G.Wells or Conan Doyle’s tales of the uncanny.
The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar—
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.
Here in the womb of the world—here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat—
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth –
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.
They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o’er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, ‘Let us be one!’
3. Recessional (1897)
Written for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, readers at the time and ever since have been struck by the absence of Pomp and Glory and rejoicing and jubilation. The opposite: the poem is a gloomy pessimistic vision of the way all empires fade and die and so the British Empire will, too. It is a sober call to duty and righteousness. It is on the basis of this solemn incantation that Eliot describes Kipling as ‘a great hymn writer’ – ‘Something breaks through from a deeper level than that of the mind of the conscious observer of political and social affairs – something which has the true prophetic inspiration.’
God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!
4. Gethsemane (1914-18)
Eliot says he doesn’t understand this poem. I see it as remarkably simple, in fact the simplicity of rhyme scheme, the short lines, the repetitive words all contribute to its haunting limpidity. The soldier going up the line towards the trenches pauses with his troop and officer for a rest, and bitterly prays that the cup – i.e. his death, his doom, his fate – will pass from him i.e. be avoided. But it isn’t. He is gassed. Compare and contrast with the long bouncy rhythms and good humour of Fuzzy Wuzzy, with the grand rolling phrases of Recessional, the eerie visionariness of the Sea Cables, and you begin to see Kipling’s variety and virtuosity. He could write poems for all occasions, for all moods – and they are not just good but brilliant.
The Garden called Gethsemane
In Picardy it was,
And there the people came to see
The English soldiers pass.
We used to pass—we used to pass
Or halt, as it might be,
And ship our masks in case of gas
Beyond Gethsemane.
The Garden called Gethsemane,
It held a pretty lass,
But all the time she talked to me
I prayed my cup might pass.
The officer sat on the chair,
The men lay on the grass,
And all the time we halted there
I prayed my cup might pass.
It didn’t pass—it didn’t pass –
It didn’t pass from me.
I drank it when we met the gas
Beyond Gethsemane!
5. Epitaph of War
Eliot writes: ‘Good epigrams in English are very rare; and the great hymn writer is very rare. Both are extremely objective types of verse: they can and should be charged with intense feeling, but it must be a feeling that is completely shared.’ Kipling had the inspired idea during and after the Great War to use the extremely short, abbreviated format of epigrams found in the Green Anthology as models for very short poems commemorating aspects of the conflict. Hence:
Common Form
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
Conclusion
Although not a totally coherent piece of prose (given its occasionally rambling and repetitious structure), Eliot’s 30-page essay on Kipling nonetheless contains more ideas and insights into his verse than anything else I’ve read.
Related links
- A Choice of Kipling’s Verse by T.S. Eliot on Amazon
- Index of Kipling’s works, including his poetry, on the University of Adelaide website
- Alphabetical list of Kipling’s poems on the Kipling Society website
Other Kipling reviews
- Strange Tales (2006)
- The Best Short Stories (1997)
- Rudyard Kipling: Selected Poetry edited by Craig Raine (1992)
- War Stories and Poems (1990)
- Rudyard Kipling: Selected Verse edited by James Cochrane (1977)
- Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Art by Charles Carrington (1955)
- Charles Carrington on Kipling’s verse (1955)
- A Choice of Kipling’s Verse by T.S. Eliot (1941)
- Something of Myself (1937)
- Limits and Renewals (1932)
- The Muse Among the Motors (1904-1929)
- Debits and Credits (1926)
- A Diversity of Creatures (1917)
- Rewards and Fairies (1910)
- Actions and Reactions (1909)
- Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906)
- Traffics and Discoveries (1904)
- Just So stories (1902)
- Kim (1901)
- The Absent-Minded Beggar (1899)
- Stalky and Co (1899)
- The Day’s Work (1898)
- Captains Courageous (1897)
- The Seven Seas (1896)
- The Jungle Books (1895, 1895)
- Many Inventions (1893)
- Barrack Room Ballads (1892)
- Life’s Handicap (1891)
- The Light That Failed (1891)
- The Man Who Would Be King and other stories (1888)
- Plain Tales From The Hills (1888)
Books & Boots 