The Poetry of Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
"The Poetry of Kipling" refers to the body of work created by Rudyard Kipling, a prolific poet and author whose writing began in earnest at the age of eleven. Kipling is perhaps best known for specific poems such as "Recessional," "Gunga Din," and "Mandalay," which reflect themes tied to the British Empire and its cultural complexities. His poetry is characterized by memorable language and a rhythmic quality, making it accessible to a wide audience, including those with limited literacy. Kipling's style often draws upon ballads, music-hall songs, and biblical texts, lending a lyrical and sometimes didactic tone to his verses.
While Kipling's poetry has been criticized for lacking depth in its perceptions, it is often praised for its emotional conviction and ability to capture the spirit of its subjects, ranging from the valor of soldiers to the nuances of colonial life. His work reflects a frontier-bred perspective, focusing on the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, and often highlighting the complexities and contradictions of imperialism. Despite facing periods of rejection and obscurity after his initial fame, Kipling's poetry remains significant, offering insights into the attitudes and values of his time, as well as the enduring legacy of the British Empire.
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The Poetry of Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
First published:Departmental Ditties, 1886; Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses, 1890; The Seven Seas, 1896; Recessional and Other Poems, 1899; The Five Nations, 1913; Puck of Pook’s Hill, 1906; Rewards and Fairies, 1910; The Years Between, 1919; Sixty Poems, 1939; Rudyard Kipling’s Verse (definitive edition), 1940
Critical Evaluation:
Kipling began writing poetry in 1876 at the age of eleven; sixty years later he was forgotten, mistrusted, or despised for his popularity that had begun with Departmental Ditties fifty years earlier. Kipling’s early success led to the Nobel Prize and his rejection of the Order of Merit, to be followed by later obloquy; today he is honestly respected for his short stories but still reluctantly for his verse, in spite of the selection of his poetry edited by T. S. Eliot in 1941. Yet Kipling is remembered most for his poems—“Recessional,” “Gunga Din,” “Mandalay,” “The Land,” “Danny Deever,” “The Mary Gloster’”—and for such quotable lines as these from “The Ladies”:
. . . The Colonel’s Lady and Judy
The inescapable fact remains that if poetry is memorable speech, Kipling had the gift, used it, and was loved for it. He was the latest and the most prolific of the popular poets and perhaps the last in this century. His popularity came from his felicitous handling of the lolloping and hence memorable meters of anapest and dactyl, his wide range of novel, picturesque material, and his clear distinction in each poem between right and wrong. The lack of depth in his perceptions is balanced by the strength of his convictions and emotions. His material gave a voice or at least an echo to the people from whom it was drawn, and his easy superficiality of form and content made those people, generally at an elementary or largely oral level of literacy, read him eagerly and quote him frequently. His well-known “If” is an example of his popular, didactic appeal. This is not the whole of Kipling, but it is essential in the ballad-laureate of Empire.
The sources of Kipling’s style are the ballad, the music-hall song, and the Psalms. The last gives him the long, prophetic line in which he sent home the dispatches in verse from the outskirts of the British Empire. Much more of his verse is accompanied by the choruses which perform the same iterative function. The ballads, of which “Sestina of the Tramp-Royal,” is typical, are among his simplest and best though not most memorable verse, such as the quietly noble ballad stanzas of “The Veterans,” written for “the gathering of survivors of the Indian Mutiny” in 1907, or the gentle raillery of “The Three-Decker.” Many poems depend on prologues and epilogues set in italics which bring the poem round to a repetition of the opening lines, again for emphasis. The most characteristic feature of his verse is its introduction not so much of cliches like “the White Man’s Burden” in a poem of that title (addressed with considerable foresight to America) but of foreign terms. There are too many of these in the Indian poems, in which the Anglo-Indian is showing off to his British cousins: “all along of abbynay, kul, an’ hazar-ho”; but a large number of poems stemming from the South African war and the larger number celebrating British regiments use native and military terms easily, such as kopje and voorlooper in “Two Kopjes.” The worst feature of the verse is the hackneyed Cockney that his private soldiers speak; this dialect sounds better in prose.
A curious feature of Kipling’s work is that he published in a unique form, most of his volumes combining stories and poems, sometimes with the same titles, such as “The Benefactors.” Both are so related in Puck of Pook’s Hill, which contains ten stories and sixteen poems that it is a moot point whether his poems can be considered apart from the stories they illustrate (the subtitles often refer to these) or the events they celebrate, as in “The Rowers: 1902: When Germany Proposed that England should help her in a Naval Demonstration to collect debts from Venezuela.” At least once his topicality misfired. “The Ballad of the ’Clampherdown’” records the boarding of a cruiser in battle; it was intended to mock the notion of boarding but was taken as Kiplingesque exaltation of the good old days.
Kipling’s range of material was in facts, not ideas. The occupations of the folk heroes of his ballads, from the water-carrier in “Gunga Din” to the ship’s engineer in “McAndrew’s Hymn” to the Viceroy of India in “One Viceroy Resigns: Lord Dufferin to Lord Landsdowne,” are exalted as the cogs of Empire, without his realizing, as George Orwell later pointed out, that an empire exists to preserve and extend an imbalance of trade.
Kipling’s first success came when he told inside stories about the Indian Civil Service, for which his father worked, and in the next volume about the Indian Army: the materials were new in literature, the attitudes perhaps necessarily romantic as in the similar pioneer work of Bret Harte. Kipling mocks those who get promotion to the top of the ladder in the first volume and exults in the code and lore of subalterns and privates at the bottom of the scale in the second. When he turns later to English affairs, his preference is not for the artisan but for the traditional yeoman, for the Hobdens of “The Land”; he alternately scolds and praises the leaders and people of England as they falter in or carry out their manifest destiny of guiding mankind, his deepest contempt being reserved for the mob and the inept leaders, as in “The Islanders,” whom he blamed when the balance of trade evened and began to shift the other way after World War I. Kipling was born and bred on the British frontier where the issues were simplified, and his poems show his continual interest not only in India but also in South Africa, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, as in “The Parting of the Columns” and “The Song of the Cities,” stanzas on sixteen capitals of the Empire in four continents; he responded to the stimulus at the margin of Empire but found the heart of it, London, too sophisticated for his abilities and too preoccupied to heed his strident warnings.
He works mainly in the buffer area between the real center of imperial power and its subjects, often relating Eastern tales but mainly concerned with “the far-flung battle-line” between the civilized and the savage (English and fuzzy-wuzzy) and the “dominion over palm and pine” of “Recessional.” But the buffer area is the meeting place of semi-civilized and semi-savage which accounts for the brutality of one and the nobility of the other. Orwell’s termed this “colonial literature.” His phrase is accurate if one remembers that the Roman “colonus” was a military settler on the Roman imperial frontier. Here the distinctions between right and wrong are expressed in physical, not ethical force, though a simple insular ethic lies behind them.
Kipling was always conscious of the greater mass of Empire behind him whether he was confronting the Indian or the English native, and the greater is always to be imposed on the lesser; he sings the greatness of Empire in many poems. This is frontier-bred psychology always at odds with its environment whether it be the native civilization surrounding the proconsul or the settled life at “Home.” Consequently Kipling’s most dated poems show not his glorification of Empire but his continual hectoring of those who do not respond to his own vision of the “far-flung, fenceless prairie” as in “The Native-Born,” or the “Never-never country . . . behind the ranges,” which in “The Explorer” becomes “God’s present to our nation.” He is at his best when the glorification is not an oratorio on a set occasion but a lyric like “Mandalay,” or when he uses the first person plural as in “The Lesson”—“We have had an Imperial lesson. It may make us an Empire yet.”—and not the second person pronoun, as in “The Islanders”—“then was your shame revealed. At the hands of a little people, few but apt in the field.”
Kipling’s metier was light journalistic verse; it became awkwardly and strenuously didactic when he used it as a vehicle for the urgent lessons he was trying to teach the English before it was too late, and his chief enemy was apathy and ignorance about the enormous area and populations under the control of a ruling race on a small and distant island. If the authority of the knowledge he claimed turned to bullying, the sense of inescapable service was often elevated to sacrifice; he rejoices when a British Army Sergeant, “Whatsisname,” reforms the Egyptian Army (“Pharoah and the Sergeant”), or when, as in “Two Kopjes,” the British Army at last learns how to fight the Boer. Kipling weeps for the young men sent abroad untrained and forgotten, as in his commemoration of the veterans of the charge of the Light Brigade in “The Last of the Light Brigade.” His greatest success was “The Absent-Minded Beggar,” set to music and making over a quarter million pounds for the relief of the dependents of the British Tommy.
Amid the sprawl of his topics over time and space and the hustle of his many meters in hundreds of poems, it is difficult to find any guiding philosophy except a belief in the job well done. He had the pride of his own craft, and several of his best poems illuminate that craft: “The Story of Ung,” the dissatisfied Neolithic cave painter; “The Conundrum of the Workshops,” in which the Devil insists, “Is it Art?”; the famous “nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays” in “In the Neolithic Age.” Apart from an occasional lyrical response to nature, as in “The Way Through the Woods” and a frequent response to English history, his poetry is of the world of military and political affairs and sometimes that of other men who know their job: Noah in “A Truthful Song,” the smugglers in “A Smuggler’s Song,” a colonial farmer in “The Settler,” the Boer farmer-fighter in “Piet,” the Sudanese in “Fuzzy-Wuzzy,” the self-made shipping magnate of his dramatic monologue, “The ’Mary Gloster.’” The smaller the object, the sharper is his observation (“The Sergeant’s Wedding”); conversely, as the object of his poetic interest enlarged Kipling hated it, as he hates “The People” in “MacDonough’s Song.” His complementary belief in the competence of the lesser object against the greater mass is rarely defined, but it lies in the body of his own verse, the “tribal lays” in which, as in life, “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” provide all the answers before a man begins his task. From that given base all Kipling had to do was to attack inefficiency and novelty and to glorify the difficult work of the laboring few, Kipling among them, against the many. For his mass he used the British Empire at its apogee; his individual hero is “Thomas Atkins,” the British Regular soldir to whom he formally dedicated Barrack-Room Ballads and, in spirit, all his work.