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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'The Complete Poems of Rudyard Kipling,' readers are invited into the multifaceted world of one of literature's most celebrated poets. This anthology showcases Kipling's mastery of meter and rhyme, as he deftly explores themes of empire, identity, and human experience. The collection spans his entire career, revealing his evolution from a young writer inspired by the rich landscapes of colonial India to a celebrated author commenting on the complexities of the modern world. Kipling's vivid imagery and character-driven narratives resonate profoundly within the literary context of the late Victorian and early 20th century, making the collection a vital piece of the British literary canon. Rudyard Kipling, born in 1865 in India and later settled in England, was deeply influenced by his upbringing in a colonial setting. His experiences shaped his beliefs about imperialism and the interplay between cultures. Kipling's keen observations of human nature and his ability to weave intricate tales made him an important voice of his time. The racial and social dynamics present in his work often reflect the contradictions of an empire in transition, which adds depth to his poetic explorations. 'The Complete Poems of Rudyard Kipling' is a must-read for both scholars and enthusiasts of poetry alike. It not only provides an exhaustive look at Kipling's poetic legacy but also invites contemplation of the broader issues of culture and identity that continue to resonate today. This collection is invaluable for understanding the historical milieu in which Kipling wrote and the artistic expressions of the time. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Complete Poems of Rudyard Kipling
Table of Contents
Introduction
This volume presents The Complete Poems of Rudyard Kipling, gathering the poet’s verse across his career and across the principal collections: Departmental Ditties; Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads; The Seven Seas; An Almanac of Twelve Sports; The Five Nations; Songs From Books; The Years Between; and Other Poems. Its purpose is to offer readers a single, coherent access point to the range of modes in which Kipling worked, from light society pieces to grave public utterance. By assembling these books together, the collection allows the reader to follow the development of an unmistakable voice and to consider the poems in dialogue with one another.
Although celebrated for fiction, Kipling considered verse a public art and used it to address immediate audiences. His poems appeared in newspapers, periodicals, and as gathered volumes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The present collection reflects that publishing history while keeping an eye on the continuities of theme and technique. It brings into one place poems written in India early in his career, ballads shaped by barracks and music halls, maritime and imperial meditations, seasonal pieces, verses excerpted from his prose, and the grave work shaped by war. Read together, they reveal a career-long conversation about duty, craft, and community.
All items here are poems, but the range of types is unusually broad. Kipling writes ballads that tell stories in strong rhythms; dramatic monologues voiced by specific speakers; epigrams and ditties that hinge on wit; hymnal stanzas and patriotic odes; inscriptions, epitaphs, and occasional pieces; songs originally embedded in chapters of prose; and brief verses that accompany images or calendar pages. The meters include marching anapests, steady common measure, and flexible accentual lines, often reinforced by refrain and chorus. Narrative, lyrical, and satirical modes coexist, and shifts of register—from colloquial to ceremonial—are managed with a performer’s ear for timing.
Departmental Ditties introduces the early satirist, observing Anglo-Indian officialdom with a reporter’s eye and a craftsman’s compression. These verses sketch offices, clubs, and dinner tables, where careers turn on chance, vanity, and small acts of courage. The poems’ brevity, neat rhymes, and punch-line closures suit their subjects: gossip, bureaucracy, and the etiquette of power. The tone is amused but exacting, exposing pretension while acknowledging the pressures of service in a hot and intricate world. As a foundation for the later work, this volume shows how carefully Kipling could balance lightness with judgment, and how much narrative can be folded into a stanza.
Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads made widely heard the vernacular voice he crafted for common soldiers. The pieces are steeped in song: refrains, choruses, and rhythms suggest mess-room and music-hall performance. Many are dramatic monologues, in which a named or implied speaker recounts incidents of duty, love, fear, and pride. The diction carries slang and dialect without caricature, and the rhyme supports pace and memorability. These poems do not explain campaigns; they illuminate the human point of view on hardship and camaraderie. In bringing off this blend of popular manner and technical control, Kipling extended the reach of English narrative verse.
In The Seven Seas, horizons widen. The poems draw on maritime labor, trade routes, telegraph lines, and the sense of a world knit by ships and cables. Chanty-like measures alternate with reflective meditations on power, risk, and interdependence. Voices multiply: captains and clerks share space with abstracted, almost choric pieces about tides of commerce and communication. The book registers confidence in craft and machine, but it also tests the costs that accompany scale. Experimenting with length and structure, Kipling uses cadence to evoke swell and surge, finding in the sea both a literal workplace and a figure for a connected modernity.
An Almanac of Twelve Sports distills his gift for occasional verse into compact studies of activity and season. Each piece aligns a sport with a month, and the poems are tuned to gesture and moment rather than to grand statement. The original publication paired verse with images, and the poems keep that visual economy: a few strokes suggest a field, a crowd, a motion about to break. Humor and elegance sit easily together. Read within the complete poems, the almanac shows another register of his technique—precision of cadence and detail—complementing the larger canvases of the maritime and national books.
The Five Nations gathers poems that consider identity, responsibility, and the mechanics of power across a rapidly changing world. The rhetoric can be public and oratorical, yet the arguments are often double-edged, weighing ambition against cost, duty against doubt. Industrial and strategic imagery enters more fully, and the handling of refrain becomes more complex, capable of sounding both assurance and warning. As a sequence, the volume moves between survey and case study, juxtaposing panoramas with specific, emblematic moments. It enlarges Kipling’s thematic field while sharpening his sense of consequence, a balance that would continue to shape the later poems.
Songs From Books brings together verse first printed within his prose narratives and essays. In their original settings, these poems act as prefaces, interludes, and codas, framing scenes or resuming themes. Read independently, they retain their clarity and carry a special concentration, since they are designed to be instantly legible within a story. Their subjects range widely, echoing voyages, fables, and adventures found elsewhere in his work, and their forms are correspondingly varied. This volume demonstrates how thoroughly Kipling thought across genres, using verse to set tone, supply chorus, or provide a memory-hook for the narrative that surrounds it.
The Years Between reflects the upheavals of the early twentieth century, including the experience and aftermath of war. The voice darkens and simplifies, moving toward elegy and exhortation. Topics include public grief, endurance, and the search for language adequate to loss. Yet the formal control remains exact: refrains are pared to essentials, and cadences are harnessed to carry hard judgment. These poems answer to events that pressed on the whole society, and they sharpen his longstanding concerns with duty, service, and the obligations of speech. They also show a writer rethinking his public role under exceptionally testing conditions.
Other Poems draws together work that did not form part of a named volume, as well as occasional, commemorative, or experimental pieces. This section completes the picture of a poet who wrote to the moment and for specific audiences as readily as he composed sustained sequences. Varied in subject and length, these poems include small pieces of observation, memorial verses, and technical exercises that reveal the underlying discipline of the larger books. Seen alongside the major collections, they help chart continuities of theme and method across decades, and they remind us of the extent to which Kipling wrote in public.
Across the whole, certain features unify the work: an unfailing ear for cadence; a dramatist’s instinct for voice; a craftsman’s respect for labor, whether artisanal, military, or maritime; and an interest in community bound by duty and story. The poems engage the politics and ethics of empire and nation, and their treatment of those subjects continues to provoke debate. They also offer durable pleasures of sound, narrative, and pattern. This collection’s aim is not to resolve the tensions it reveals but to make them legible. Read in sequence or at large, the poems reward attention with energy, clarity, and memorable design.
Author Biography
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was a British writer of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, celebrated for his short stories, poems, and children’s books. Born in British India and later based in Britain and the United States at different points, he became one of the most widely read authors of his time. His work combined technical brilliance, vivid storytelling, and a distinctive ear for speech and song. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first English-language author to do so and then the youngest recipient. Both admired and contested, he remains central to debates about empire, childhood, and modern narrative craft.
Kipling spent his earliest years in Bombay before being educated in England. He attended the United Services College in Devon, a school that prepared boys for military and colonial careers. The discipline, camaraderie, and schoolboy rivalries he observed there later informed his fiction. Returning to the Indian subcontinent as a young adult, he entered journalism rather than university, a path that honed his observational skills and concise prose. His reading included English balladry, the King James Bible, and popular adventure narratives, while his multilingual surroundings in India exposed him to folktales, proverbs, and cadences that shaped his narrative voices and interest in borderlands and bureaucracy.
Kipling’s career began in earnest as a reporter and editor with English-language newspapers in Lahore and Allahabad. He collected his topical verses in Departmental Ditties and crafted Indian-set short stories that appeared in Plain Tales from the Hills and other volumes in the late 1880s. These works showcased his gift for compressed dialogue, ironic reversals, and close attention to the ranks of colonial society. He soon produced enduring tales such as The Man Who Would Be King and the soldier poems later grouped as Barrack-Room Ballads, which captured barracks slang and marching rhythms. Early fame rested on his ability to make far-flung settings immediate to metropolitan readers.
In the 1890s Kipling traveled widely and, for a period, lived in New England. This international interlude coincided with a surge of productivity. He published The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book, whose animal fables and jungle lore remain fixtures of children’s literature, as well as Captains Courageous, a maritime coming-of-age novel. He also issued verse collections such as The Seven Seas, confirming his reputation as a poet of empire and technology. These years solidified his command of the short story and juvenile fiction, blending brisk plotting with memorable refrains, parables of responsibility, and an ability to move between wonder, humor, and stern moral clarity.
Returning to Britain by the turn of the century, Kipling entered a mature phase marked by range and authority. Kim offered a panoramic view of the subcontinent through espionage and pilgrimage, while Just So Stories distilled creation tales into playful, tightly patterned prose. Stalky & Co. revisited school life with satirical bite. In poetry he published The Five Nations and provocative pieces such as “The White Man’s Burden,” which drew intense discussion. His poem “If—,” later collected in Rewards and Fairies, became one of the most quoted in English. In 1907 the Nobel Prize recognized the breadth, energy, and technical control of his work.
Kipling was an ardent imperial commentator, advocating duty, stoicism, and national service. He reported from South Africa during the Boer War and later supported the war effort during the First World War. Personal loss during the conflict deepened the somber register of his later poems and commemorative writing. He contributed to the work of the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission, helping to shape inscriptions and the tone of remembrance. Volumes such as Epitaphs of the War and his regimental history of the Irish Guards showed restrained grief and formal rigor. Even admirers noted the gravity that entered his voice, a counterpoint to the exuberance of earlier tales.
In his later years Kipling wrote essays, travel sketches, and tales that reflected on industry, folklore, and national memory, while he settled into a leading, if controversial, public role. He died in the mid-1930s and was buried in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. His legacy is complex: children’s stories and adventure narratives remain widely read, his poems are recited and anthologized, and his short stories are praised for narrative economy and tonal control. At the same time, his imperial attitudes have prompted sustained critique and reappraisal. Today he is studied as a major craftsman whose art and politics are inseparable subjects of literary debate.
Historical Context
Rudyard Kipling’s poetic career unfolded across the high noon and long twilight of the British Empire, from his birth in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1865 to his death in London in 1936. His verse registers the surge of late-Victorian expansion and technology, the anxieties of Edwardian geopolitics, and the catastrophes of the First World War. The collection as a whole is shaped by imperial governance, maritime commerce, soldiering, and settler frontiers, but also by the countercurrents—nationalist agitation, labour unrest, and social reform—that complicated imperial triumphalism. These poems inhabit cantonments and shipyards, Sussex lanes and South African veld, reflecting a global Britain and its contested moral, cultural, and political authority.
Kipling’s formative years in India grounded his perspective on bureaucracy, social hierarchy, and colonial etiquette. Educated in England at Southsea and at the United Services College, Westward Ho!, he returned to the Punjab in 1882 to work for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and later The Pioneer in Allahabad. This press world, orbiting Simla’s summer government and the rhythms of the Raj, exposed him to Indian languages, Anglo-Indian slang, departmental protocols, and frontier dispatches. The poems emerging from that milieu draw upon offices and outposts, monsoon and dust, and the negotiations—comic, biting, and rueful—of a ruling service spread thin across the subcontinent.
The late-nineteenth-century British Army, reshaped by the Cardwell and Childers reforms (1870–81), provided Kipling a lexicon of rank, drill, and barrack-room speech. Soldiers cycled through colonial campaigns in Afghanistan, Burma, and on the Northwest Frontier, while music halls gave their idiom popular currency at home. This moment fostered the persona of “Tommy Atkins,” the ordinary soldier whose voice runs through much of Kipling’s verse. The ethos was neither purely celebratory nor uniformly critical: recruitment drives, medal parades, and pension disputes jostled with desert heat, dysentery, and class condescension. The poems’ cadence and slang register a democratizing print culture that let rankers’ stories travel well beyond garrison towns.
The maritime infrastructure that underwrote British power—coaling stations, cable-laying ships, imperial ports—formed a world-system Kipling understood intimately. The Suez Canal (opened 1869), global telegraph networks, and steamship lines compressed distance and time, binding Bombay, Cape Town, Sydney, Halifax, and London. Merchant seamen, stokers, shipwrights, and admirals appear as protagonists of an oceanic drama in which freight rates, monsoon patterns, and naval blockades mattered as much as battle honours. The late-Victorian “Pax Britannica” and, later, the battleship arms race culminating in HMS Dreadnought (1906) shadow the poems’ sense of opportunity and peril, as maritime confidence is tempered by storms, strikes, wrecks, and moral reckoning.
Turn-of-the-century British culture valorized sport as moral training, binding public schools, regiments, and clubs in a creed of fair play and endurance. Kipling’s verse often aligns seasonal rhythms—frost and harvest, monsoon and dust—with the ceremonial calendar of hunts, cricket fixtures, and regimental meets. The late-Victorian cult of “Muscular Christianity” and the Edwardian enthusiasm for organized leisure supplied idioms for character and nationhood. In the 1890s, stylized graphic design and poster art—exemplified by William Nicholson’s bold woodcut aesthetic—intersected with playful verses and almanac formats. Across the oeuvre, sport becomes shorthand for self-command, gamesmanship, and the social choreography of class and empire.
The South African War (Second Boer War, 1899–1902) was a crucible for British self-conception, exposing logistical strain, civilian suffering, and media-driven patriotism. Kipling spent time in South Africa, working with a soldiers’ newspaper, The Friend, at Bloemfontein in 1900 and wintering in Cape Town. The sieges of Kimberley, Ladysmith, and Mafeking, the controversies over concentration camps, and the military reforms that followed supplied a dense backdrop for poems about duty, fundraising, and disillusion. Friendships and frictions with imperial actors—Cecil Rhodes among them—brought policy debates home to the page. The war’s rhetoric of sacrifice and service, later revisited critically, reverberates across multiple volumes.
Kipling’s transatlantic years sharpened his global vantage. After marrying Caroline Balestier in London in 1892, he lived in Brattleboro, Vermont, at the hilltop house Naulakha, while continuing to publish in British and American periodicals. His time in the United States coincided with the Panic of 1893, the Chicago World’s Fair, and the gradual Anglo-American rapprochement of the 1890s. Legal and familial disputes hastened his 1896 return to England, but the American experience—its newspapers, oratory, and industrial drive—remained vivid. The Spanish–American War (1898) and debates on the Philippines brought questions of empire, race, and responsibility into a wider Atlantic conversation to which his poems often respond.
Jubilee culture framed British imperial self-awareness in the 1880s and 1890s. Queen Victoria’s Golden (1887) and Diamond (1897) Jubilees synchronized pageantry from London to Calcutta, parading imperial forces and colonial elites. Yet the spectacle also stirred unease about hubris and ephemerality. Kipling’s occasional verse from this period blends public hymnody and private admonition, invoking biblical cadences to critique complacency. The expanded electorate, Nonconformist activism, and missionary societies fed both triumph and doubt. The poems’ tension—between thanksgiving and warning—tracks a broader cultural reckoning with prosperity’s moral costs and with the fragility of a system that depended on sea lanes, credit, and the consent of the governed.
Industrial modernity—railways, engines, workshops, and wireless—surfaces across Kipling’s poems as a spiritual and social fact. Britain’s engineers, fitters, and marine crews become protagonists whose workmanship is a moral vocation. The Indian rail network, explosive growth in steel and shipbuilding, and global telegraphy reoriented daily life, compressing empires into timetables and tariffs. Kipling’s admiration for craft sits alongside anxieties about mechanization’s dehumanizing drift. Poems to and about machines articulate a theology of limits: power bound to duty, innovation tempered by humility. This industrial poetics drew on technical jargon and hymn forms, reflecting a society that sacralized progress even as it feared its unintended consequences.
Kipling wrote in an India changing under modern political agitation. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, fostered constitutional critique; the Ilbert Bill controversy (1883) and the Partition of Bengal (1905) galvanized public politics, swadeshi boycotts, and press activism. He had known the Anglo-Indian club world and the bazaar as a journalist, and his poems echo debates over “martial races,” civil service reform, and the limits of paternalism. Figures like Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and Bal Gangadhar Tilak personified divergent strategies of empire-talk. Across the oeuvre, India is neither backdrop nor set-piece but a lived field where loyalty, language, and legitimacy are perpetually negotiated.
Home islands politics also pressed upon Kipling’s imagination. The Irish Home Rule crises, culminating in the Ulster Covenant (1912) and paramilitary mobilization in both Ulster and the south, exposed centrifugal forces within the United Kingdom itself. British party alignments fractured over tariff reform, social insurance, and constitutional limits after the 1909 People’s Budget and the 1911 Parliament Act. Kipling’s unionism and suspicion of constitutional brinkmanship informed several public interventions. The poems’ concern with civil order, voluntary association, and historic continuity should be read against the era’s fears of sectarian violence, class conflict, and imperial unraveling—pressures that tightened dramatically with the outbreak of European war in 1914.
The First World War reoriented Kipling’s verse toward grief, commemoration, and endurance. His only son, John (born 1897), was reported missing, presumed killed at Loos in September 1915, a loss that shaped later poems’ austerity and rage. Kipling also served as a literary advisor to the Imperial War Graves Commission (founded 1917 under Fabian Ware), helping to craft inscriptions such as “Known unto God” and endorsing “Their Name Liveth For Evermore.” The home front’s rationing, munitions works, and volunteer corps enter the poetic record beside Salonika fevers and Flanders mud. The rhetorical register tightens: aphorism, epitaph, and parable replace the earlier expansiveness of imperial celebration.
Postwar Britain confronted demobilization, inflation, and political realignment. The Armistice (1918) and Paris Peace Conference (1919) redrew frontiers while leaving resentments smouldering. In Ireland, the War of Independence (1919–21) accelerated imperial contraction; in India, the 1919 Rowlatt Acts and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre deepened alienation. The 1918 influenza pandemic and 1920s industrial unrest unsettled social trust. Kipling’s later poems interrogate victory’s cost and the lure of ideological simplifications. They turn to epitaph, cautionary myth, and gnomic counsel about character, work, and memory, resisting both utopian internationalism and nihilistic despair. This chastened temper colors the whole collection, retroactively darkening earlier triumphal notes.
Kipling’s aesthetic draws on vernacular speech, hymn tunes, ballad refrains, and dramatic monologue, marrying popular entertainment with classical allusion. He cultivated dialects—Anglo-Indian argot, barrack slang, Scots, and the cadences of biblical English—both to widen poetic address and to foreground contested authority. The resulting register invited charges of jingoism and sentimentality, yet it also carried working voices into elite print culture. Prosodically, he used heavy stress, refrain, and song form to torque moral narrative into memorability. This formal palette allowed the poems to circulate as broadsides, schoolroom recitations, and music-hall turns, embedding imperial argument and ethical instruction in the rhythms of everyday speech.
Periodical culture and publishing networks were decisive. Kipling learned speed and concision in the Lahore newsroom, then found metropolitan champions in editors such as W. E. Henley at the Scots Observer and National Observer in the early 1890s. Literary agents like A. P. Watt and Anglo-American publishers engineered simultaneous editions, while unauthorized reprints and copyright gaps exposed him to a transatlantic mass audience. The public’s appetite for recitation pieces, topical verse, and illustrated gift-books shaped composition and selection. His poems often began as occasional pieces—responses to naval scares, jubilees, or elections—before settling into collected volumes that arranged topical flashpoints within longer arcs of character and craft.
Travel and settlement anchored Kipling’s double vision of England and the wider world. After peripatetic years, he purchased Bateman’s, a seventeenth-century house at Burwash, Sussex, in 1902. Sussex lanes, iron-working history, and village lore fed his historical imagination, even as he continued to winter in South Africa and lecture in Canada and elsewhere. Dominion circuits—Canadian railways, Australian ports, New Zealand farms—appeared as laboratories of a self-governing imperial ideal. Freemasonry, which he entered in Lahore in 1886, supplied additional networks and symbols of fraternity. The poems’ oscillation between hearth and horizon, parish and ocean, reflects this settled restlessness, a constant testing of Englishness against global experience.
Recognition and reassessment frame Kipling’s long reception. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, then the youngest laureate and the first writing in English, he stood as a spokesman for craftsmanship and imperial ethics. Yet from the 1920s onward, and especially after 1945, readers have probed the poetry’s racial and political assumptions while acknowledging its technical force. Kipling died in 1936 and was buried in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, as the Statute of Westminster (1931) signalled Dominion autonomy and anti-colonial movements gathered strength. The collected poems preserve a record of power, doubt, and duty across five decades, inviting argument as much as admiration.
Synopsis (Selection)
Departmental Ditties
Satirical light verse on the British colonial civil service in India, lampooning bureaucracy, ambition, and social pretenses. Brief, witty pieces sketch office intrigues and Anglo-Indian life under the Raj.
Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads
Dramatic monologues and songs voiced by rank-and-file soldiers, portraying barracks life, campaigns, and the burdens of service. Rhythmic, dialect-rich ballads emphasize duty, camaraderie, hardship, and the human cost of empire.
The Seven Seas
Maritime and industrial-themed poems mapping a global, sea-linked world of trade, ships, and technology. Character monologues and odes to engineers and seafarers explore mobility, faith, ambition, and the price of expansion.
An Almanac of Twelve Sports
A month-by-month suite of brief verses on quintessential English sports, originally paired with illustrations. Playful sketches capture players, spectators, and seasonal moods, highlighting custom and the social rituals of games.
The Five Nations
Public and imperial verse on war, governance, and national character across Britain and its dominions at the turn of the twentieth century, much of it shaped by the Boer War. The poems weigh duty and destiny against disillusion and loss.
Songs From Books
Lyrics and epigraphs drawn from Kipling’s prose, gathered into a sequence that echoes adventures, folklore, and moral puzzles from his fiction. Ranging from lullabies to marching songs, they frame themes of childhood, craft, and empire.
The Years Between
Poems from the First World War and its aftermath, blending elegy, indictment, and national reflection. They commemorate the dead and scrutinize responsibility, betrayal, and the war’s moral reckonings.
Other Poems
A varied selection of occasional pieces and standalone lyrics spanning Kipling’s career. It includes hymns, satires, epitaphs, and meditations on work, faith, nationhood, and individual conduct beyond the major volumes.
The Complete Poems of Rudyard Kipling
Departmental Ditties
I have eaten your bread and salt, I have drunk your water and wine, The deaths ye died I have watched beside, And the lives that ye led were mine.
Was there aught that I did not share In vigil or toil or ease, One joy or woe that I did not know, Dear hearts across the seas?
I have written the tale of our life For a sheltered people's mirth, In jesting guise—but ye are wise, And ye know what the jest is worth.
General Summary
We are very slightly changed From the semi-apes who ranged India's prehistoric clay; Whoso drew the longest bow, Ran his brother down, you know, As we run men down today.
"Dowb," the first of all his race, Met the Mammoth face to face On the lake or in the cave, Stole the steadiest canoe, Ate the quarry others slew, Died—and took the finest grave.
When they scratched the reindeer-bone Someone made the sketch his own, Filched it from the artist—then, Even in those early days, Won a simple Viceroy's praise Through the toil of other men.
Ere they hewed the Sphinx's visage Favoritism governed kissage, Even as it does in this age.
Who shall doubt the secret hid Under Cheops' pyramid Was that the contractor did Cheops out of several millions? Or that Joseph's sudden rise To Comptroller of Supplies Was a fraud of monstrous size On King Pharoah's swart Civilians?
Thus, the artless songs I sing Do not deal with anything New or never said before.
As it was in the beginning, Is today official sinning, And shall be forevermore.
Army Headquarters
Old is the song that I sing[1q]— Old as my unpaid bills— Old as the chicken that kitmutgars bring Men at dak-bungalows—old as the Hills.
Ahasuerus Jenkins of the "Operatic Own" Was dowered with a tenor voice of super-Santley tone.
His views on equitation were, perhaps, a trifle queer; He had no seat worth mentioning, but oh! he had an ear.
He clubbed his wretched company a dozen times a day, He used to quit his charger in a parabolic way, His method of saluting was the joy of all beholders, But Ahasuerus Jenkins had a head upon his shoulders.
He took two months to Simla when the year was at the spring, And underneath the deodars eternally did sing.
He warbled like a bulbul, but particularly at Cornelia Agrippina who was musical and fat.
She controlled a humble husband, who, in turn, controlled a Dept., Where Cornelia Agrippina's human singing-birds were kept From April to October on a plump retaining fee, Supplied, of course, per mensem, by the Indian Treasury.
Cornelia used to sing with him, and Jenkins used to play; He praised unblushingly her notes, for he was false as they: So when the winds of April turned the budding roses brown, Cornelia told her husband: "Tom, you mustn't send him down."
They haled him from his regiment which didn't much regret him; They found for him an office-stool, and on that stool they set him, To play with maps and catalogues three idle hours a day, And draw his plump retaining fee—which means his double pay.
Now, ever after dinner, when the coffeecups are brought, Ahasuerus waileth o'er the grand pianoforte; And, thanks to fair Cornelia, his fame hath waxen great, And Ahasuerus Jenkins is a power in the State.
Study of an Elevation, in Indian Ink
This ditty is a string of lies. But—how the deuce did Gubbins rise?
POTIPHAR GUBBINS, C. E., Stands at the top of the tree; And I muse in my bed on the reasons that led To the hoisting of Potiphar G.
Potiphar Gubbins, C. E., Is seven years junior to Me; Each bridge that he makes he either buckles or breaks, And his work is as rough as he.
Potiphar Gubbins, C. E., Is coarse as a chimpanzee; And I can't understand why you gave him your hand, Lovely Mehitabel Lee.
Potiphar Gubbins, C. E., Is dear to the Powers that Be; For They bow and They smile in an affable style Which is seldom accorded to Me.
Potiphar Gubbins, C. E., Is certain as certain can be Of a highly-paid post which is claimed by a host Of seniors—including Me.
Careless and lazy is he, Greatly inferior to Me.
What is the spell that you manage so well, Commonplace Potiphar G.?
Lovely Mehitabel Lee, Let me inquire of thee, Should I have riz to what Potiphar is, Hadst thou been mated to me?
A Legend
This is the reason why Rustum Beg, Rajah of Kolazai, Drinketh the "simpkin" and brandy peg, Maketh the money to fly, Vexeth a Government, tender and kind, Also—but this is a detail—blind.
RUSTUM BEG of Kolazai—slightly backward native state Lusted for a C. S. I.,—so began to sanitate. Built a Jail and Hospital—nearly built a City drain— Till his faithful subjects all thought their Ruler was insane.
Strange departures made he then—yea, Departments stranger still, Half a dozen Englishmen helped the Rajah with a will, Talked of noble aims and high, hinted of a future fine For the state of Kolazai, on a strictly Western line.
Rajah Rustum held his peace; lowered octroi dues a half; Organized a State Police; purified the Civil Staff; Settled cess and tax afresh in a very liberal way; Cut temptations of the flesh—also cut the Bukhshi's pay;
Roused his Secretariat to a fine Mahratta fury, By a Hookum hinting at supervision of dasturi; Turned the State of Kolazai very nearly upside-down; When the end of May was nigh, waited his achievement crown.
When the Birthday Honors came, Sad to state and sad to see, Stood against the Rajah's name nothing more than C. I. E.!
Things were lively for a week in the State of Kolazai. Even now the people speak of that time regretfully.
How he disendowed the Jail—stopped at once the City drain; Turned to beauty fair and frail—got his senses back again; Doubled taxes, cesses, all; cleared away each new-built thana; Turned the two-lakh Hospital into a superb Zenana;
Heaped upon the Bukhshi Sahib wealth and honors manifold; Clad himself in Eastern garb—squeezed his people as of old.
Happy, happy Kolazai! Never more will Rustum Beg Play to catch the Viceroy's eye. He prefers the "simpkin" peg.
The Story of Uriah
"Now there were two men in one city; the one rich and the other poor."
Jack Barrett went to Quetta Because they told him to. He left his wife at Simla On three-fourths his monthly screw: Jack Barrett died at Quetta Ere the next month's pay he drew.
Jack Barrett went to Quetta. He didn't understand The reason of his transfer From the pleasant mountain-land: The season was September, And it killed him out of hand.
Jack Barrett went to Quetta, And there gave up the ghost, Attempting two men's duty In that very healthy post; And Mrs. Barrett mourned for him Five lively months at most.
Jack Barrett's bones at Quetta Enjoy profound repose; But I shouldn't be astonished If now his spirit knows The reason of his transfer From the Himalayan snows.
And, when the Last Great Bugle Call Adown the Hurnal throbs, When the last grim joke is entered In the big black Book of Jobs, And Quetta graveyards give again Their victims to the air, I shouldn't like to be the man Who sent Jack Barrett there.
The Post That Fitted
Though tangled and twisted the course of true love This ditty explains, No tangle's so tangled it cannot improve If the Lover has brains.
Ere the steamer bore him Eastward, Sleary was engaged to marry An attractive girl at Tunbridge, whom he called "my little Carrie."
Sleary's pay was very modest; Sleary was the other way. Who can cook a two-plate dinner on eight poor rupees a day?
Long he pondered o'er the question in his scantly furnished quarters— Then proposed to Minnie Boffkin, eldest of Judge Boffkin's daughters.
Certainly an impecunious Subaltern was not a catch, But the Boffkins knew that Minnie mightn't make another match.
So they recognised the business and, to feed and clothe the bride, Got him made a Something Something somewhere on the Bombay side.
Anyhow, the billet carried pay enough for him to marry— As the artless Sleary put it:—"Just the thing for me and Carrie."
Did he, therefore, jilt Miss Boffkin—impulse of a baser mind? No! He started epileptic fits of an appalling kind.
[Of his modus operandi only this much I could gather:— "Pears's shaving sticks will give you little taste and lots of lather."]
Frequently in public places his affliction used to smite Sleary with distressing vigour—always in the Boffkins' sight.
Ere a week was over Minnie weepingly returned his ring, Told him his "unhappy weakness" stopped all thought of marrying.
Sleary bore the information with a chastened holy joy,— Epileptic fits don't matter in Political employ,— Wired three short words to Carrie—took his ticket, packed his kit— Bade farewell to Minnie Boffkin in one last, long, lingering fit.
Four weeks later, Carrie Sleary read—and laughed until she wept— Mrs. Boffkin's warning letter on the "wretched epilept."...
Year by year, in pious patience, vengeful Mrs. Boffkin sits Waiting for the Sleary babies to develop Sleary's fits.
PUBLIC WASTE
Walpole talks of "a man and his price." List to a ditty queer— The sale of a Deputy-Acting-Vice- Resident-Engineer, Bought like a bullock, hoof and hide, By the Little Tin Gods on the Mountain Side.
By the Laws of the Family Circle 'tis written in letters of brass That only a Colonel from Chatham can manage the Railways of State, Because of the gold on his breeks, and the subjects wherein he must pass; Because in all matters that deal not with Railways his knowledge is great.
Now Exeter Battleby Tring had laboured from boyhood to eld On the Lines of the East and the West, and eke of the North and South; Many Lines had he built and surveyed—important the posts which he held; And the Lords of the Iron Horse were dumb when he opened his mouth.
Black as the raven his garb, and his heresies jettier still— Hinting that Railways required lifetimes of study and knowledge— Never clanked sword by his side—Vauban he knew not nor drill— Nor was his name on the list of the men who had passed through the "College."
Wherefore the Little Tin Gods harried their little tin souls, Seeing he came not from Chatham, jingled no spurs at his heels, Knowing that, nevertheless, was he first on the Government rolls For the billet of "Railway Instructor to Little Tin Gods on Wheels."
Letters not seldom they wrote him, "having the honour to state," It would be better for all men if he were laid on the shelf. Much would accrue to his bank-book, an he consented to wait Until the Little Tin Gods built him a berth for himself,
"Special, well paid, and exempt from the Law of the Fifty and Five, Even to Ninety and Nine"—these were the terms of the pact: Thus did the Little Tin Gods (long may Their Highnesses thrive!) Silence his mouth with rupees, keeping their Circle intact;
Appointing a Colonel from Chatham who managed the Bhamo State Line (The which was one mile and one furlong—a guaranteed twenty-inch gauge), So Exeter Battleby Tring consented his claims to resign, And died, on four thousand a month, in the ninetieth year of his age!
Delilah
We have another viceroy now,—those days are dead and done Of Delilah Aberyswith and depraved Ulysses Gunne.
Delilah Aberyswith was a lady—not too young— With a perfect taste in dresses and a badly-bitted tongue, With a thirst for information, and a greater thirst for praise, And a little house in Simla in the Prehistoric Days.
By reason of her marriage to a gentleman in power, Delilah was acquainted with the gossip of the hour; And many little secrets, of the half-official kind, Were whispered to Delilah, and she bore them all in mind.
She patronized extensively a man, Ulysses Gunne, Whose mode of earning money was a low and shameful one. He wrote for certain papers, which, as everybody knows, Is worse than serving in a shop or scaring off the crows.
He praised her "queenly beauty" first; and, later on, he hinted At the "vastness of her intellect" with compliment unstinted. He went with her a-riding, and his love for her was such That he lent her all his horses and—she galled them very much.
One day, THEY brewed a secret of a fine financial sort; It related to Appointments, to a Man and a Report. 'Twas almost worth the keeping,—only seven people knew it— And Gunne rose up to seek the truth and patiently pursue it.
It was a Viceroy's Secret, but—perhaps the wine was red— Perhaps an Aged Councillor had lost his aged head— Perhaps Delilah's eyes were bright—Delilah's whispers sweet— The Aged Member told her what 'twere treason to repeat.
Ulysses went a-riding, and they talked of love and flowers; Ulysses went a-calling, and he called for several hours; Ulysses went a-waltzing, and Delilah helped him dance— Ulysses let the waltzes go, and waited for his chance.
The summer sun was setting, and the summer air was still, The couple went a-walking in the shade of Summer Hill. The wasteful sunset faded out in Turkish-green and gold, Ulysses pleaded softly, and— that bad Delilah told!
Next morn, a startled Empire learnt the all-important news; Next week, the Aged Councillor was shaking in his shoes. Next month, I met Delilah and she did not show the least Hesitation in affirming that Ulysses was a "beast."
We have another Viceroy now, those days are dead and done— Of Delilah Aberyswith and most mean Ulysses Gunne!
What Happened
Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, pride of Bow Bazaar, Owner of a native press, "Barrishter-at-Lar," Waited on the Government with a claim to wear Sabres by the bucketful, rifles by the pair.
Then the Indian Government winked a wicked wink, Said to Chunder Mookerjee: "Stick to pen and ink. They are safer implements, but, if you insist, We will let you carry arms wheresoe'er you list."
Hurree Chunder Mookerjee sought the gunsmith and Bought the tubes of Lancaster, Ballard, Dean, and Bland, Bought a shiny bowie-knife, bought a town-made sword, Jingled like a carriage-horse when he went abroad.
But the Indian Government, always keen to please, Also gave permission to horrid men like these— Yar Mahommed Yusufzai, down to kill or steal, Chimbu Singh from Bikaneer, Tantia the Bhil;
Killar Khan the Marri chief, Jowar Singh the Sikh, Nubbee Baksh Punjabi Jat, Abdul Huq Rafiq— He was a Wahabi; last, little Boh Hla-oo Took advantage of the Act—took a Snider too.
They were unenlightened men, Ballard knew them not. They procured their swords and guns chiefly on the spot; And the lore of centuries, plus a hundred fights, Made them slow to disregard one another's rights.
With a unanimity dear to patriot hearts All those hairy gentlemen out of foreign parts Said: "The good old days are back—let us go to war!" Swaggered down the Grand Trunk Road into Bow Bazaar,
Nubbee Baksh Punjabi Jat found a hide-bound flail; Chimbu Singh from Bikaneer oiled his Tonk jezail; Yar Mahommed Yusufzai spat and grinned with glee As he ground the butcher-knife of the Khyberee.
Jowar Singh the Sikh procured sabre, quoit, and mace, Abdul Huq, Wahabi, jerked his dagger from its place, While amid the jungle-grass danced and grinned and jabbered Little Boh Hla-oo and cleared his dah-blade from the scabbard.
What became of Mookerjee? Soothly, who can say? Yar Mahommed only grins in a nasty way, Jowar Singh is reticent, Chimbu Singh is mute. But the belts of all of them simply bulge with loot.
What became of Ballard's guns? Afghans black and grubby Sell them for their silver weight to the men of Pubbi; And the shiny bowie-knife and the town-made sword are Hanging in a Marri camp just across the Border.
What became of Mookerjee? Ask Mahommed Yar Prodding Siva's sacred bull down the Bow Bazaar. Speak to placid Nubbee Baksh—question land and sea— Ask the Indian Congressmen—only don't ask me!
Pink Dominoes
They are fools who kiss and tell"— Wisely has the poet sung. Man may hold all sorts of posts If he'll only hold his tongue.
Jenny and Me were engaged, you see, On the eve of the Fancy Ball; So a kiss or two was nothing to you Or any one else at all.
Jenny would go in a domino— Pretty and pink but warm; While I attended, clad in a splendid Austrian uniform.
Now we had arranged, through notes exchanged Early that afternoon, At Number Four to waltz no more, But to sit in the dusk and spoon.
I wish you to see that Jenny and Me Had barely exchanged our troth; So a kiss or two was strictly due By, from, and between us both.
When Three was over, an eager lover, I fled to the gloom outside; And a Domino came out also Whom I took for my future bride.
That is to say, in a casual way, I slipped my arm around her; With a kiss or two (which is nothing to you), And ready to kiss I found her.
She turned her head and the name she said Was certainly not my own; But ere I could speak, with a smothered shriek She fled and left me alone.
Then Jenny came, and I saw with shame She'd doffed her domino; And I had embraced an alien waist— But I did not tell her so.
Next morn I knew that there were two Dominoes pink, and one Had cloaked the spouse of Sir Julian House, Our big Political gun.
Sir J. was old, and her hair was gold, And her eye was a blue cerulean; And the name she said when she turned her head Was not in the least like "Julian."
The Man Who Could Write
Shun—shun the Bowl! That fatal, facile drink Has ruined many geese who dipped their quills in 't; Bribe, murder, marry, but steer clear of Ink Save when you write receipts for paid-up bills in 't.
There may be silver in the "blue-black"—all I know of is the iron and the gall.
Boanerges Blitzen, servant of the Queen, Is a dismal failure—is a Might-have-been. In a luckless moment he discovered men Rise to high position through a ready pen. Boanerges Blitzen argued therefore—"I, With the selfsame weapon, can attain as high." Only he did not possess when he made the trial, Wicked wit of C-lv-n, irony of L—l.
[Men who spar with Government need, to back their blows, Something more than ordinary journalistic prose.]
Never young Civilian's prospects were so bright, Till an Indian paper found that he could write: Never young Civilian's prospects were so dark, When the wretched Blitzen wrote to make his mark. Certainly he scored it, bold, and black, and firm, In that Indian paper—made his seniors squirm, Quoted office scandals, wrote the tactless truth— Was there ever known a more misguided youth? When the Rag he wrote for praised his plucky game, Boanerges Blitzen felt that this was Fame; When the men he wrote of shook their heads and swore, Boanerges Blitzen only wrote the more:
Posed as Young Ithuriel, resolute and grim, Till he found promotion didn't come to him; Till he found that reprimands weekly were his lot, And his many Districts curiously hot.
Till he found his furlough strangely hard to win, Boanerges Blitzen didn't care to pin: Then it seemed to dawn on him something wasn't right— Boanerges Blitzen put it down to "spite";
Languished in a District desolate and dry; Watched the Local Government yearly pass him by; Wondered where the hitch was; called it most unfair.
That was seven years ago—and he still is there!
Municipal
"Why is my District death-rate low?" Said Binks of Hezabad. "Well, drains, and sewage-outfalls are "My own peculiar fad.
"I learnt a lesson once, It ran "Thus," quoth that most veracious man:—
It was an August evening and, in snowy garments clad, I paid a round of visits in the lines of Hezabad; When, presently, my Waler saw, and did not like at all, A Commissariat elephant careering down the Mall.
I couldn't see the driver, and across my mind it rushed That that Commissariat elephant had suddenly gone musth.
I didn't care to meet him, and I couldn't well get down, So I let the Waler have it, and we headed for the town.
The buggy was a new one and, praise Dykes, it stood the strain, Till the Waler jumped a bullock just above the City Drain; And the next that I remember was a hurricane of squeals, And the creature making toothpicks of my five-foot patent wheels.
He seemed to want the owner, so I fled, distraught with fear, To the Main Drain sewage-outfall while he snorted in my ear— Reached the four-foot drain-head safely and, in darkness and despair, Felt the brute's proboscis fingering my terror-stiffened hair.
Heard it trumpet on my shoulder—tried to crawl a little higher— Found the Main Drain sewage outfall blocked, some eight feet up, with mire; And, for twenty reeking minutes, Sir, my very marrow froze, While the trunk was feeling blindly for a purchase on my toes!
It missed me by a fraction, but my hair was turning grey Before they called the drivers up and dragged the brute away.
Then I sought the City Elders, and my words were very plain. They flushed that four-foot drain-head and—it never choked again!
You may hold with surface-drainage, and the sun-for-garbage cure, Till you've been a periwinkle shrinking coyly up a sewer.
I believe in well-flushed culverts....
This is why the death-rate's small; And, if you don't believe me, get shikarred yourself. That's all.
A Code of Morals
Lest you should think this story true I merely mention I Evolved it lately. 'Tis a most Unmitigated misstatement.
Now Jones had left his new-wed bride to keep his house in order, And hied away to the Hurrum Hills above the Afghan border, To sit on a rock with a heliograph; but ere he left he taught His wife the working of the Code that sets the miles at naught.
And Love had made him very sage, as Nature made her fair; So Cupid and Apollo linked, per heliograph, the pair. At dawn, across the Hurrum Hills, he flashed her counsel wise— At e'en, the dying sunset bore her husband's homilies.
He warned her 'gainst seductive youths in scarlet clad and gold, As much as 'gainst the blandishments paternal of the old; But kept his gravest warnings for (hereby the ditty hangs) That snowy-haired Lothario, Lieutenant-General Bangs.
'Twas General Bangs, with Aide and Staff, who tittupped on the way, When they beheld a heliograph tempestuously at play. They thought of Border risings, and of stations sacked and burnt— So stopped to take the message down—and this is what they learnt—
"Dash dot dot, dot, dot dash, dot dash dot" twice. The General swore.
"Was ever General Officer addressed as 'dear' before? "'My Love,' i' faith! 'My Duck,' Gadzooks! 'My darling popsy-wop!' "Spirit of great Lord Wolseley, who is on that mountaintop?"
The artless Aide-de-camp was mute; the gilded Staff were still, As, dumb with pent-up mirth, they booked that message from the hill; For clear as summer lightning-flare, the husband's warning ran:— "Don't dance or ride with General Bangs—a most immoral man."
[At dawn, across the Hurrum Hills, he flashed her counsel wise— But, howsoever Love be blind, the world at large hath eyes.] With damnatory dot and dash he heliographed his wife Some interesting details of the General's private life.
The artless Aide-de-camp was mute, the shining Staff were still, And red and ever redder grew the General's shaven gill.
And this is what he said at last (his feelings matter not):— "I think we've tapped a private line. Hi! Threes about there! Trot!"
All honour unto Bangs, for ne'er did Jones thereafter know By word or act official who read off that helio.
But the tale is on the Frontier, and from Michni to Mooltan They know the worthy General as "that most immoral man."
The Last Department
Twelve hundred million men are spread About this Earth, and I and You Wonder, when You and I are dead, "What will those luckless millions do?"
None whole or clean, we cry, "or free from stain Of favour." Wait awhile, till we attain The Last Department where nor fraud nor fools, Nor grade nor greed, shall trouble us again.
Fear, Favour, or Affection—what are these To the grim Head who claims our services? I never knew a wife or interest yet Delay that pukka step, miscalled "decease";
When leave, long overdue, none can deny; When idleness of all Eternity Becomes our furlough, and the marigold Our thriftless, bullion-minting Treasury
Transferred to the Eternal Settlement, Each in his strait, wood-scantled office pent, No longer Brown reverses Smith's appeals, Or Jones records his Minute of Dissent.
And One, long since a pillar of the Court, As mud between the beams thereof is wrought; And One who wrote on phosphates for the crops Is subject-matter of his own Report.
These be the glorious ends whereto we pass— Let Him who Is, go call on Him who Was; And He shall see the mallie steals the slab For currie-grinder, and for goats the grass.
A breath of wind, a Border bullet's flight, A draught of water, or a horse's fright— The droning of the fat Sheristadar Ceases, the punkah stops, and falls the night
For you or Me. Do those who live decline The step that offers, or their work resign? Trust me, Today's Most Indispensables, Five hundred men can take your place or mine.
Other Verses
Recessional (A Victorian Ode)
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![3q]
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! Amen.
The Vampire
The verses—as suggested by the painting by Philip Burne Jones, first exhibited at the new gallery in London in 1897.
A fool there was and he made his prayer (Even as you and I!) To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair (We called her the woman who did not care), But the fool he called her his lady fair (Even as you and I!)
Oh the years we waste and the tears we waste And the work of our head and hand, Belong to the woman who did not know (And now we know that she never could know) And did not understand.
A fool there was and his goods he spent (Even as you and I!) Honor and faith and a sure intent But a fool must follow his natural bent (And it wasn't the least what the lady meant), (Even as you and I!)
Oh the toil we lost and the spoil we lost And the excellent things we planned, Belong to the woman who didn't know why (And now we know she never knew why) And did not understand.
The fool we stripped to his foolish hide (Even as you and I!) Which she might have seen when she threw him aside— (But it isn't on record the lady tried) So some of him lived but the most of him died— (Even as you and I!)
And it isn't the shame and it isn't the blame That stings like a white hot brand.
It's coming to know that she never knew why (Seeing at last she could never know why) And never could understand.
To the Unknown Goddess
Will you conquer my heart with your beauty; my soul going out from afar? Shall I fall to your hand as a victim of crafty and cautious shikar?
Have I met you and passed you already, unknowing, unthinking and blind? Shall I meet you next session at Simla, O sweetest and best of your kind?
Does the P. and O. bear you to meward, or, clad in short frocks in the West, Are you growing the charms that shall capture and torture the heart in my breast?
Will you stay in the Plains till September—my passion as warm as the day? Will you bring me to book on the Mountains, or where the thermantidotes play?
When the light of your eyes shall make pallid the mean lesser lights I pursue, And the charm of your presence shall lure me from love of the gay "thirteen- two";
When the peg and the pig-skin shall please not; when I buy me Calcutta-build clothes; When I quit the Delight of Wild Asses; forswearing the swearing of oaths; As a deer to the hand of the hunter when I turn 'mid the gibes of my friends; When the days of my freedom are numbered, and the life of the bachelor ends.
Ah, Goddess! child, spinster, or widow—as of old on Mars Hill whey they raised To the God that they knew not an altar—so I, a young Pagan, have praised The Goddess I know not nor worship; yet, if half that men tell me be true, You will come in the future, and therefore these verses are written to you.
The Rupaiyat of Omar Kal'vin
[Allowing for the difference 'twixt prose and rhymed exaggeration, this ought to reproduce the sense of what Sir A— told the nation sometime ago, when the Government struck from our incomes two per cent.]
Now the New Year, reviving last Year's Debt, The Thoughtful Fisher casteth wide his Net; So I with begging Dish and ready Tongue Assail all Men for all that I can get.
Imports indeed are gone with all their Dues— Lo! Salt a Lever that I dare not use, Nor may I ask the Tillers in Bengal— Surely my Kith and Kin will not refuse!
Pay—and I promise by the Dust of Spring, Retrenchment. If my promises can bring Comfort, Ye have Them now a thousandfold— By Allah! I will promise Anything!
Indeed, indeed, Retrenchment oft before I swore—but did I mean it when I swore? And then, and then, We wandered to the Hills, And so the Little Less became Much More.
Whether a Boileaugunge or Babylon, I know not how the wretched Thing is done, The Items of Receipt grow surely small; The Items of Expense mount one by one.
I cannot help it. What have I to do With One and Five, or Four, or Three, or Two? Let Scribes spit Blood and Sulphur as they please, Or Statesmen call me foolish—Heed not you.
Behold, I promise—Anything You will. Behold, I greet you with an empty Till— Ah! Fellow-Sinners, of your Charity Seek not the Reason of the Dearth, but fill.
For if I sinned and fell, where lies the Gain Of Knowledge? Would it ease you of your Pain To know the tangled Threads of Revenue, I ravel deeper in a hopeless Skein?
"Who hath not Prudence"—what was it I said, Of Her who paints her Eyes and tires Her Head, And gibes and mocks the People in the Street, And fawns upon them for Her thriftless Bread?
Accursed is She of Eve's daughters—She Hath cast off Prudence, and Her End shall be Destruction... Brethren, of your Bounty Some portion of your daily Bread to Me.
La Nuit Blanche
A much-discerning Public hold The Singer generally sings And prints and sells his past for gold.
Whatever I may here disclaim, The very clever folk I sing to Will most indubitably cling to Their pet delusion, just the same.
I had seen, as the dawn was breaking And I staggered to my rest, Tari Devi softly shaking From the Cart Road to the crest.
I had seen the spurs of Jakko Heave and quiver, swell and sink. Was it Earthquake or tobacco, Day of Doom, or Night of Drink?
In the full, fresh fragrant morning I observed a camel crawl, Laws of gravitation scorning, On the ceiling and the wall; Then I watched a fender walking, And I heard grey leeches sing, And a red-hot monkey talking Did not seem the proper thing.
Then a Creature, skinned and crimson, Ran about the floor and cried, And they said that I had the "jims" on, And they dosed me with bromide, And they locked me in my bedroom— Me and one wee Blood Red Mouse— Though I said: "To give my head room You had best unroof the house."
But my words were all unheeded, Though I told the grave M.D. That the treatment really needed Was a dip in open sea That was lapping just below me, Smooth as silver, white as snow, And it took three men to throw me When I found I could not go.
Half the night I watched the Heavens Fizz like '81 champagne— Fly to sixes and to sevens, Wheel and thunder back again; And when all was peace and order Save one planet nailed askew, Much I wept because my warder Would not let me set it true.
After frenzied hours of waiting, When the Earth and Skies were dumb, Pealed an awful voice dictating An interminable sum, Changing to a tangle story— "What she said you said I said"— Till the Moon arose in glory, And I found her... in my head;
Then a Face came, blind and weeping, And It couldn't wipe its eyes, And It muttered I was keeping Back the moonlight from the skies; So I patted it for pity, But it whistled shrill with wrath, And a huge black Devil City Poured its peoples on my path.
So I fled with steps uncertain On a thousand-year long race, But the bellying of the curtain Kept me always in one place; While the tumult rose and maddened To the roar of Earth on fire, Ere it ebbed and sank and saddened To a whisper tense as wire.
In tolerable stillness
