Kipling’s Poetic Hits (And Misses)

I know how to kipple. And I am an unabashed fan of Rudyard Kipling’s poems, most of his short stories, and some of his novels. But there are things he wrote that I dearly love and have memorized, that I turn to as touchstones, and some that make me wince, or scratch my head and wonder what he was thinking, and a few that make no sense without a great deal of knowledge of the headlines of the time when he wrote.

I’m not a Kipling specialist, so this is Alma’s own list. You might agree, disagree, or say, “Meh. Not bad but not great either.” I’m also a great fan of the late Victorian adventure story and the tales of the Great Game, so that tends to colour my preferences.

In no particular order, other than “Recessional” and “Jobson’s Amen,” because those may be my two favorites, for very different reasons.

Scene and setting poems: “Bridge Guard in the Karroo,” “Puck’s Song,” “Lichtenberg,”  “The Explorer (Something Lost Beyond the Ranges)“,  “Jobson’s Amen,” “Mandalay,” “Love Song of Har Dyal,” “The Way Through the Woods”

Story poems: “The Ballad of East and West,” “Gunga Din,” “The Last Suttee,” “The Grave of the Hundred Head,” “Cain and Abel” (fighting over water is as old as time), “Jubal and Tubal Cain,” “Giffen’s Debt,” “Ford o’ Kabul River,” “A Code of Morals,” “Municipal,”

Politics and History: “Runnymede,” “Arithmetic on the Frontier,” “The Dawn Wind,” “Gods of the Copy-book Headings,” “Our Lady of the Snows,” “Song of the Dead” especially the second section (“We have fed our sea for a thousand years/And she calls us, still unfed;”), “Two Kopjes,”

Philosophy and Religion: “Buddha at Kamakura,” “When Earth’s Last Picture is Painted,” “Eddi’s service,” “Hymn before Action,” “The Last Chantey,” “Cities and Thrones and Powers,” ‘The Mother Lodge,” “Certain Maxims of Hafiz,” “The Sons of Martha,” ‘The Thousandth Man,” “In the Neolithic Age,” and “Natural Philosophy.” Note in the last one that “L.S.D.” stands for pounds, shillings, and pence, not the current association.

 

Misses? ‘The Red Earl,” “Russia to the Pacifists,” some of the Departmental Ditties, “The City of Brass” because it is too topical, the one about the goat, the stone and the tarn, his verse plays.

Welcome, Instapundit readers! Thank you for visiting. It’s wonderful to see other Kipling fans.