This Penguin edition from 1977 has neither introduction nor end notes, in fact there is no editorial matter of any kind. It also contains only 119 poems, compared to 183 in the Craig Raine selection and 123 in the T.S. Eliot edition. On the face of it, the Raine edition is the best paperback selection, casting its net widest, including more of the early light verse, and more oddities and rarities: it’s the most diverse and the most entertaining.

Where this edition does score over both the others is in its layout. Each new poem starts at the top of a page. Both the other editions run one poem straight on after the previous one, so poems start mid-page or right at the bottom of a page, with maybe just one stanza visible before you have to turn over and continue. Sometimes, given that Kipling poems often comes in sets and also often have a preliminary stanza in italics before the main poem begins, this layout can lead to real confusion.

Trivial though this may sound, the layout of this Cochrane edition does actually give each poem a kind of dignity and space in which to operate. When a poem ends the rest of the page is blank. You turn over – and a new one begins. It’s much clearer and easier to read than the other two.

Partly because of this, reading this edition I noticed poems which, although they’re included in the other editions, are broken up across several pages whereas here, starting at the top of their own dedicated page, they immediately had more presence and made more impact.

And once again, the poems amazed me with Kipling’s range. I was particularly struck by The Way Through The Woods (1910). A world away from the bouncy music hall ballads or the sonorous hymns of the 1890s, it could be by the sensitive Georgian poet Edward Thomas.

The Way Through The Woods

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.

Related links

• An 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)