Fifty-one years after T.S. Eliot’s selection of Kipling’s verse, with an accompanying essay, was published in 1941, the poet Craig Raine was invited to make a new selection and write a new introduction. His selection is larger (183 poems compared to Eliot’s 123) and ranges further, including much more of the early verse (a generous selection of the ‘Departmental Ditties’) and more of the ‘incidental’ poems which Kipling attached to his many short stories.
The 16-page introduction is puzzlingly diffuse, making a handful of useful points but rather buried among lengthy digressions on a range of subjects. Half way through I began to wonder whether he had some kind of bet with a friend on how many other writers (and painters and musicians) he could name drop in such a short space.
Name-dropping
Oscar Wilde’s catty criticism of Plain Tales From The Hills is quoted on page one (‘one feels as if one were under a palm tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity’) as is some Eliot; on page two he mentions Matthew Arnold’s famous criticism of Alexander Pope and John Dryden (he dismissed them as ‘classics of our prose’), which Eliot then reversioned in his criticism of Walt Whitman in his essay about Ezra Pound. This leads into a page extensively quoting and praising Pope’s style, before going on to a one-page analysis of a witty piece of light verse by contemporary American writer Garrison Keillor. Then there is an extended consideration of how the metres of Russian poetry (with name-checks for the poets Pushkin, Pasternak and Mayakovsky) demonstrate enormous subtlety but, alas, translate badly into English where convoluted metres and rhythms tend to be associated with comedy.
None of this really sheds much light on Kipling and feels a lot like name-dropping padding.
1. Kipling and the underdog
Wilde is mentioned early on not only to squeeze in his famous quote but to emphasise Kipling’s own early remark that he was well aware he wrote only verse – and this leads Raine to make one of the three or so substantial points which emerge from his essay:
What Wilde ruefully perceives as a limitation is precisely what Kipling knew to be his originality – the discovery for literature of the underdog… Kipling’s uncommon fascination with the common man and the common woman – his helpless underdoggedness.
Raine immediately moves on without exploring the idea any further, which is a missed opportunity. It is pretty well known that all through his career Kipling sang the praises of the forgotten and ignored soldiers, sailors, engineers and administrators who kept the vast machinery of the Empire going, who kept the peace and enforced the law and built the bridges and created the railroads and maintained the vast fleet of merchant ships which brought the luxuries of life to a pampered elite in London who made it their life’s work to mock and scorn the very people their lifestyle depended on. You can see why he was almost permanently cross, and why his criticisms of the pampered, ignorant English are sometimes so bitter.
In a way Raine’s selection speaks more clearly than this confusing introduction. Thus around page 80 of the book he includes three poems in succession which aren’t in the Eliot selection and which powerfully convey the underdog idea, the plight of the ‘few, forgotten and lonely’.
An interlude of scansion
The introduction jumps suddenly to a consideration of two lines in The Ballad of the Bolivar and rather abruptly introduces some highly technical terms from the study of scansion – telling us that one line contains a trochaic tetrameter catalectic followed by a trochaic trimeter catalectic, being:
Leaking like a lobster pot, steering like a dray
In other words, the line consists of a tetrameter of four beats, with a pause (or caesura) at the comma, and the second half is a trimeter i.e. has three beats.
Leaking like a lobster pot, steering like a dray
… / v / v / v / , / v / v /
(where the oblique stroke indicates a stressed syllable and the v indicates an unstressed syllable). If this had been the start of an extensive consideration of Kipling’s metres or how he adapted metres of Tennyson or Swinburne, this might have been illuminating – but the subject appears with this one example and just as abruptly disappears.
2. Kipling and dialect
Buried among the blizzard of names and digressions, there are some reasonably forthright statements:
Dialect is Kipling’s greatest contribution to modern literature – prose and poetry – and he is the most accomplished practitioner since Burns.
But even this insight is restricted to one sentence which is swiftly buried in a fog of references to other writers and other texts: in this instance Raine moves swiftly on to a consideration of George Orwell’s essay on Kipling, published in 1942, and itself a long review of the Eliot selection & essay, before progressing to quote from a pamphlet by the critic D.J. Enright’s about Eliot – this is a lot of distracting digression instead of simply unpacking the importance of Kipling’s use of dialect with some examples and analysis.
Virtuosity
Raine moves on to mention Kipling’s virtuosity, his astonishing fluency, which many critics and readers in his time and ours have found ‘suspect’, under the impression that poetry should somehow be ‘difficult’ and show signs of artistic ‘struggle’.
Raine gives as an example Kipling’s mastery of the difficult verse form of the sestina, in his poem ‘Sestina of the Tramp-Royal‘ – although, characteristically, even this requires a knowing reference to Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘A Miracle for Breakfast’, as a ‘perfect example’ of the form instead of an analysis of how a sestina is constructed, and how cunningly Kipling constructed this one.
3. Stravinsky and Picasso
The artificiality of this sestina’s form (the use of six lines which are reshuffled in each of the poem’s six verses) is partly concealed by Kipling’s use of dialect. It would have been useful to have a bit more about dialect, maybe a survey of the different dialects Kipling uses. Instead Raine goes on to suggest that, instead of being associated with music hall and popular forms as most people tend to, maybe ‘it would be more helpful and truer’ to classify Kipling’s poetry with the modernism of Stravinsky and Picasso, who used contemporary rags and tags of tunes and material to construct collages, cubist pictures, fractured music.
This seems, frankly, wrong.
Unsparing imagery
Having made this bold suggestion, the introduction jumps to a completely new topic, which is Kipling’s unsentimental eye for realism, for the often stomach-churning detail. Raine gives a good selection of Kipling’s vivid imagery, starting with the description of a leper in Gehazi.
The boils that shine and burrow,
The sores that slough and bleed.
Or the violent description of Matun, the beggar whose entire face was ripped off by a bear in The Truce of the Bear:
Flesh like slag in the furnace, knobbed and withered and grey –
Going on to quote other vivid descriptive phrases, like the:
- beefy face an’ grubby ‘and [of London housemaids]
- breech-blocks jammed with mud
- the ten-times fingering weed
- blanket-hidden bodies, flagless, followed by the flies
- [on] ‘Is carcase past rebellion, but ‘is eyes inquirin’ why
He’s onto something here, several things:
- One of the several reasons Kipling’s poetry rises above the level of ‘verse’ – beside the seriousness and intensity of the feeling – is for the sheer vividness of his imagery.
- But the violence of these images are a continual reminder that there is a strongly aggressive strand in Kipling’s poetry which wants to sicken and disgust the reader, to appal and nauseate us with the reality of the India or war or the devastation he is describing.
Kipling’s seascapes
Raine points out Kipling’s many wonderful descriptions of the sea, painted in numerous poems with wonderful fluency, although – typically – he can’t do so without reference to another canonical writer, in this case superfluously comparing Kipling’s sea verse with James Joyce’s description of the sea at Sandymount Strand outside Dublin, in Ulysses. Well, they’re both good descriptions of the sea, but that basic level of similarity doesn’t make Kipling part of Joyce’s Modernism. There’s a wonderful poem The Bell Buoy in which a bell in a buoy at sea contrasts his lot with the other bells cast in the same foundry which have ended up in churches inland.
The beach-pools cake and skim,
The bursting spray-heads freeze,
I gather on crown and rim
The grey, grained ice of the seas,
Where, sheathed from bitt to trees,
The plunging colliers lie.
Would I barter my place for the Church’s grace?
(Shoal ! ‘Ware shoal!) Not I!
Kipling and the contemporary world
Raine says that Kipling is concerned not with poeticisms or the high-toned poetic rhetoric of his day – the flowery ‘thees’, ‘thous’ and periphrases which make the poets of the 1880s and 1890s unreadable to us now. Kipling endures because he is interested in the actual world he lives in – with its trains and cars and electric lights and steam engines. It is this unembarrassed consideration of the present, Raine asserts, which places Kipling in the company of poets like Baudelaire and Eliot, laureates of the modern city. And leads up to a repeat of his earlier point about Stravinsky and Picasso:
Kipling, then, is a modernist rather than the dated Edwardian of conventional criticism.
Raine backs this up by claiming that T.S. Eliot himself, dean of Modernist poets, used Kipling’s metres in poems like his ‘Preludes’ and ‘The Hollow Men’, before giving half a page asserting Kipling’s influence on the closing pages of Ezra Pound’s ‘Pisan Cantos’. Well a) Kipling used so many rhyme schemes, formats and rhythms that it would be difficult for any poet not to overlap with him in some places b) the chaotic formlessness of Pound’s Cantos and the gasping pitifulness of the Pisan Cantos in particular, seems to me miles away from the permanent bumptious confidence of Kipling. In fact it’s the very lack of doubt or emotional vulnerability that many people so dislike in Kipling’s poetry and stories.
Now we see the reason for the thin unconvincing comparison with Stravinsky or Picasso, and the reason for yanking Joyce into the text – they’re all to bolster Raine’s counter-intuitive argument that, far from being a stylistic and political reactionary, Kipling was in fact a radical and modernist. The argument is padded out with another extraneous comparison, this time contrasting Kipling’s descriptions of war zones with those of W.H. Auden, concluding that Kipling’s are ‘less mannered and contrived’. Well, it’s true that Auden’s are done with a kind of cosmopolitan urbanity and Kipling’s are done with the bloody-minded grittiness of the man on the spot. The lines quoted are from The Return (1903):
Towns without people, ten times took,
An’ ten times left an’ burned at last;
An’ starvin’ dogs that come to look
For owners when a column passed…
An’ the pore dead that look so old
An’ was so young an hour ago,
An’ legs tied down before they’re cold –
These are the things which make you know.
Summary
In conclusion, the three main points of Raine’s essay are that:
- Kipling was a master of dialect – which nobody would deny
- Kipling was in favour of the underdog, the unsung heroes of Empire, the suffering soldiers and sailors and engineers – again, fairly obvious
- Kipling was, despite all indications to the contrary, a Modernist poet – which I don’t think anybody could really accept. Was he like Stravinsky and Picasso in revolutionising the art form he worked in, leaving it irrevocably transformed for all his contemporaries and successors? No. Are his sea descriptions as good as James Joyce’s? Yes, but their aims and methods were very different, Joyce dissolving the English language while Kipling made the existing language more forceful.
The selection not the introduction
Where Raine’s introduction does succeed is in selecting snippets and excerpts which cumulatively give you a vivid feel for just how good a poet Kipling was, gifted not only with the journalist’s or political propagandist’s turn of phrase, but regularly – in poem after poem – surprising us with the acuity and precision of his word selection and phrasing. And this is made much clearer by the range and variety of Raine’s actual selection.
Contrast with Eliot’s selection
Raine points out that T.S. Eliot’s selection was made in 1941, at the darkest point of the Second World War, when all of Europe was occupied by the Nazis who had undertaken what looked likely to be a successful invasion of Russia, and therefore the establishment of a continent-wide totalitarian regime based on mass slave labour, concentration camps and genocidal extermination. Not surprising then, Raine claims that Eliot’s selection emphasises Kipling’s patriotic works, with a predominance of the ‘hymns’ and the high-flown calls to Duty.
By contrast (although he doesn’t explicitly state this anywhere) Raine’s own selection is much broader, including a larger number of more diverse poems. The bits of Kipling which Raine quotes in the introduction (when he stops referencing Arnold, Wilde, Poe, Dryden, Whitman, Pound, Auden, Bishop and so on) suggest that what particularly attracts him is Kipling’s vivid turns of phrase – not just Kipling’s brilliance at painting the contemporary world, his use of dialect or his mastery of complex forms – but his continual brilliance with the unexpected word and phrase which brings so many of the poems to life.
In ranging wider than Eliot, Raine’s collection includes more of the precocious juvenilia and Departmental Ditties (published when Kipling was just 21) which Eliot consciously excludes. Raine includes more of the broadly comic and satiric poems and ‘trivia’, like his pastiches of classic English poets writing about motor cars which, one feels, were beneath Eliot’s notice.
Right from the first pages, Raine’s selection is more fun than Eliot’s.
The early poems showcase how astonishingly fluent Kipling was even as a teenager, and how this fluency was directed, to begin with, into poems written to entertain and fill up the daily newspaper he worked on. For example, the witty and cynical The Post That Fitted written when he was just 20. Instead of comparisons with Pope or Auden, it would have been really useful to have this early work set in the context of contemporary Victorian light verse and/or the Gilbert and Sullivan light comic operas (which we know were popular in Kipling’s school from his Stalky and Co. stories). A very early poem like Way Down the Ravi River in its gruesome humour reminds me of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear. Forget the accusations of racism and sexism – what we want to know is who was he influenced by, who was he competing with, where did he pinch his ideas from – and then the amazing way his deeper, more assured gift slowly emerged from the jungle of ephemeral entertainments to become, at its peak, the prophetic voice of the greatest Empire the world has ever seen. It’s an incredible story!
Notes and biography
Unlike Eliot’s selection, this edition has editorial footnotes at the end. Not many, but they are welcome. Eventually, as the era of Empire recedes over the horizon, Kipling’s poetry will need a full textual apparatus, beginning with a potted biography. Maybe both Eliot and Raine assume that the outlines of Kipling’s life – the toddler years in India, public school in England, working as a journalist back in India, arriving in 1890s London afire with ambition, the years in Vermont, America where he wrote the Jungle Books, the close involvement in the Boer War (travelling to South Africa to help set up a newspaper for the troops), and then the long second half of his life happily settled in rural Sussex, with the great disaster of the First World War which transformed his poetry and prose – are well enough known not to need describing, or linking to the changing interests of his poetry.
But I don’t think they are, and Kipling’s poetry awaits an edition which will clearly explain the life, his fundamental aesthetic and political beliefs, and then relate this to the full body of work. Both the Eliot and Raine essays are interesting and insightful, but neither is anything like definitive.
Two sample poems
The Return is written in the style of one of the Barrack-Room Ballads from the early 1890s but in fact describes the feelings of a soldier returning from South Africa after the end of the Boer War (May 1902) and how difficult he finds it settling back into cramped, dirty, foggy London after the wide open spaces of the African veldt.
The Return
PEACE is declared, and I return
To ‘Ackneystadt, but not the same;
Things ‘ave transpired which made me learn
The size and meanin’ of the game.
I did no more than others did,
I don’t know where the change began;
I started as a average kid,
I finished as a thinkin’ man.
If England was what England seems
An’ not the England of our dreams,
But only putty, brass, an’ paint,
‘Ow quick we’d drop ‘er! But she ain’t!
Before my gappin’ mouth could speak
I ‘eard it in my comrade’s tone;
I saw it on my neighbour’s cheek
Before I felt it flush my own.
An’ last it come to me – not pride,
Nor yet conceit, but on the ‘ole
(If such a term may be applied),
The makin’s of a bloomin’ soul.
Rivers at night that cluck an’ jeer,
Plains which the moonshine turns to sea,
Mountains that never let you near,
An’ stars to all eternity;
An’ the quick-breathin’ dark that fills
The ‘ollows of the wilderness,
When the wind worries through the ‘ills –
These may ‘ave taught me more or less.
Towns without people, ten times took,
An’ ten times left an’ burned at last;
An’ starvin’ dogs that come to look
For owners when a column passed;
An’ quiet, ‘omesick talks between
Men, met by night, you never knew
Until – ‘is face – by shellfire seen –
Once – an’ struck off. They taught me, too.
The day’s lay-out – the mornin’ sun
Beneath your ‘at-brim as you sight;
The dinner-‘ush from noon till one,
An’ the full roar that lasts till night;
An’ the pore dead that look so old
An’ was so young an hour ago,
An’ legs tied down before they’re cold –
These are the things which make you know.
Also Time runnin’ into years –
A thousand Places left be’ind –
An’ Men from both two ’emispheres
Discussin’ things of every kind;
So much more near than I ‘ad known,
So much more great than I ‘ad guessed –
An’ me, like all the rest, alone –
But reachin’ out to all the rest!
So ‘ath it come to me – not pride,
Nor yet conceit, but on the ‘ole
(If such a term may be applied),
The makin’s of a bloomin’ soul.
But now, discharged, I fall away
To do with little things again….
Gawd, ‘oo knows all I cannot say,
Look after me in Thamesfontein!
If England was what England seems
An’ not the England of our dreams,
But only putty, brass, an’ paint,
‘Ow quick we’d chuck ‘er! But she ain’t!
Just as Kipling modified our reading of his stories by placing poems before and after them as oblique commentary, so even within poems he uses the possibilities of verse and chorus to create all kinds of dynamics. The refrain, in italics, comments quite harshly on the nature of England – the reference to putty, brass and paint is to the cheap fixtures of a music hall or theatre – and contrasts it with ‘the England of our dreams’ which – rather forlornly, I think – the speaker hopes England really is.
But all the imaginative force has gone into some of the wonderful moments of a soldier’s life in South Africa which the main verses capture so vividly.
The Harp Song of the Danish Women is in an unusual metre for Kipling, an obvious attempt to convey the simple power of Anglo-Saxon or of Norse poetry. Maybe it’s not a great poem but, as always, it’s well made and interesting. It was published in Puck of Pook’s Hill to accompany the story about medieval knights who are captured by Vikings and taken on a wild adventure south to Africa. As usual, it doesn’t comment on the events of the story directly, but conveys an atmosphere or backdrop which deepens its impact.
The Harp Song of the Danish Women
What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?
She has no house to lay a guest in—
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.
She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you—
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.
Yet, when the signs of summer thicken,
And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,
Yearly you turn from our side, and sicken—
Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters.
You steal away to the lapping waters,
And look at your ship in her winter-quarters.
You forget our mirth, and talk at the tables,
The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables—
To pitch her sides and go over her cables.
Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow,
And the sound of your oar-blades, falling hollow,
Is all we have left through the months to follow.
Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker ?
Related links
- Rudyard Kipling: Selected Poetry edited by Craig Raine 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 