Charles Carrington’s biography of Kipling is a masterpiece, not only of privileged research (he had access to family papers and diaries which were later destroyed, as well as close advice from Kipling’s only surviving child, Elsie, b.1896) but of balance and careful judgment, and with wonderfully evocative passages of its own.
For a whole generation homesickness was reversed by Kipling’s magic spell. Englishmen felt the days of England sick and cold and the skies grey and old, heard the East a-calling, fawned on the younger nations, learned to speak the jargon of the seven seas; while, in the outposts of empire, men who read no other books recognised and approved the glimpses of their own lives in phrases from Kipling’s verse: the flying-fishes and the thunder-clouds over the Bay of Bengal, the voyage outward-bound till the old lost stars wheel back, the palm-tree bowing down beneath a low African moon, the wild tide-race that whips the harbour-mouth at Melbourne, the broom flowering above the windy town at Wellington, the islands where the anchor-chain goes rippling down through the coral-trash. (Rudyard Kipling His Life and Work by Charles Carrington, Penguin paperback edition p.398)
Carrington on Kipling’s verse
Two thirds of the way through the 600-page book, Carrington pauses his narrative to give a ten-page essay on Kipling’s verse, which is packed with insights:
The ballad
Carrington draws a direct link between Kipling and Sir Walter Scott, another writer prolific in popular verse and tales, who dominated his age. Kipling’s mother (Alice MacDonald) was Scottish, and he showed a marked fondness for Scottish characters (notable the famous engineer McAndrew) and Scots dialect.
Carrington summarises on page 413 the elements of Scott’s use of Lowland popular verse as including:
- the free borrowing or adaptation of his predecessors
- stylised imagery
- the use of incantatory repetitions
- harmonics of words meant to be recited against the background of simple instrumental music
- changes of sentiment indicated by changes of rhythm
- the violent alternations of the grotesque, the horrible and the pathetic
To this list I’d add the deliberate use of older ‘poetic’ words and phrases. But whereas in Scott these are references to older Scots speech and pseudo-medievalisms, Kipling’s poems are drenched with the lexicon and rhythms of the Bible.
Influence of the Bible
Both Kipling’s parents were the children of Methodist ministers, reared in God-fearing, Bible-quoting households. In his horrible childhood in Southsea the young Kipling was tyrannised by a tub-thumping, Evangelical housewife in a household where Bible readings and hymn singing were compulsory.
This was the common fare of the great bulk of the English people in the nineteenth century – of almost all of them, it may be said, except the deracinated intellectuals. It was precisely because Kipling’s prose repeatedly echoes Biblical rhythms and turns of phrase that it was accepted and understood by a public that read the Bible, but did not read Walter Pater. (p.415)
His more serious poems were written in a didactic and sonorous style which directly derives from Hymns Ancient and Modern, ‘by far the most popular volume of verse in nineteenth century England’.
Popular tunes
But Carrington’s biggest insight into Kipling’s verse is the fact that he composed it to the rhythm of musical tunes. From his Methodist parents, from his harsh Evangelical upbringing, from weekly attendance at school chapel, Kipling knew a wide range of hymn tunes and, once he’d moved to London in 1889, he developed an enthusiasm for the London music hall, which introduced him to all the popular hits and melodies of the age – ‘The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo’, ‘Knocked ‘Em In The Old Kent Road’ – as well as American classics from earlier in the century like ‘John Brown’s Body’, ‘Marching Through Georgia’ and so on.
Carrington here and elsewhere in the biography quotes eye-witness accounts of the way his wife, friends and visitors would see and hear Kipling humming a tune as he walked round his study or up and down the garden or along the deck of an ocean liner, humming and singing to himself and slowly forming words which matched the rhythm of the song. His wife noted in her diary ‘Ruddy was singing a new poem today…’
He would say ‘Give me a hymn-tune’ and, when someone suggested one, would go about for days humming it over, drumming it out with his fingers until words framed themselves to the tune, intent upon that and oblivious of the world, until he had finished his verse. It did not matter, for that purpose, that the song whose tune he borrowed was quite incongruous with the poem he intended; it was the rhythm he wanted and made his own. (p.321)
It is best to think of many of his poems as music hall songs, which aren’t designed to evoke sensitive emotional responses from an aesthete drawling on a divan, but are intended to be recited and even sung, to a wide audience. Like music halls songs, they adopt a character or persona and are replete with comic ‘patter’, as a music hall star might intersperse jokes and comments into a song. And, like a song, instead of evoking a range of emotions in a range of readers, they are meant to unite an audience of listeners onto one clear and forceful message.
Carrington exemplifies the relevance of the musical interpretation over a purely technical interpretation by pointing out that both Kipling’s ‘Mandalay’ and Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’ are written in trochaic lines of eight feet.
Kipling
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea,
There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
‘Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!’
Tennyson
Thro’ the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day;
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.
The rhythm of the Kipling is more emphatic, as is the break or ‘caesura’ in the middle of each line – made crystal clear by the use of a comma – because it is a song and even if we read it silently, it still rings in our heads more like a song than a poem.
Carrington notes that Kipling himself fictionalised the process of ‘adapting’ a popular song in his comic story ‘The Village That Voted The World Was Flat’, where the village is pilloried in a popular song created by its enemies which is a straight lift of the tune of ‘Here We Go Gathering Nuts In May’. The title of the story is the title of the song and fits the tune perfectly.
Carrington identifies some tunes with specific poems: ‘Mandalay’ with a contemporary waltz tune; the refrain of ‘Follow Me ‘Ome’ with the Dead March; ‘Birds of Prey’ with ‘Knocked ‘Em In the Old Kent Road’ and, strikingly, the rhythm of ‘A School Song’ with ‘Pop Goes The Weasel’!
Let us now praise famous men’ –
Men of little showing –
For their work continueth,
And their work continueth,
Broad and deep continueth,
Greater than their knowing!
Kipling’s daughter is among the many witnesses quoted as to the importance of music in the composition process and herself suggests musical bases for some poems:
R.K. usually worked in the morning, if he had anything in hand, either doing the actual writing, or pacing up and down his study humming to himself. Much of his best known verse was written to a tune, the ‘Recessional’ to ‘Melita’, the tune usually sung to ‘Eternal Father, strong to save’; ‘Mandalay’ to an old waltz tune: and so on; this was curious as R.K. was quite unmusical. (Quoted on page 481)
The story about ‘Recessional’ fits. You can indeed fit the words of Kipling’s poem to the hymn tune:
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!
Ghostly presences
Carrington’s last thought is that most of the poems can’t be easily identified with specific songs: only Kipling knew their derivation and source, and kept his secrets. But – and this makes them all the more effective – the ghosts and hints of old-time music hall songs, popular tunes or classic hymns known to millions float across the poems, underpin them, appear and disappear in their rhythms. And this deeper fugitive layer of meaning, of rhythmic and harmonic meaning, is one of the reasons why poems which, so often, ought to be trite and vulgar, in fact possess a strange and eerie power.
Related links
- Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Work on Amazon
- Rudyard Kipling Wikipedia article
- Charles Carrington Wikipedia article
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 