by John Palmer
VIII
THE POEMS
Only the briefest epilogue is necessary concerning Mr Kipling's poetry.We have concluded as to his prose stories that his best work is in thepure fancy of _The Jungle Book_, and that we descend thence through hisEnglish tales and his celebration of the work of the world to cleverstories of India and _Soldiers Three_. Upon each of these levels wemeet with verse in the same kind, concerning which it may at once besaid that at all times, except where the rule is proved by theexception, Mr Kipling's verse is less urgently inspired than his prose.The true motive which drives a poet into verse is the perception of aquality in the thing he has to say which requires for its delivery thebeat and lift of a rhythm which crosses and penetrates the rhythm ofsense and logic. This is true even of the poetry which seems, atfirst, to contradict it. Pope's _Essay on Man_, for example, which atfirst seems no more than a neater prose than the prose of Addison, isreally not prose at all. In addition to the cool sense of what appearsto be no more than a pentametric arrangement of common-places there isa rhythm which admirably conveys, independently of what is beingactually said, the gentle perambulating of the eighteenth-centuryphilosopher in the garden which Candide retired to cultivate in thebest of all possible worlds. In all poetry there must be a manifestreason why prose would not have served the author's purpose equallywell.
Can we say this of Mr Kipling's poetry? Is Mr Kipling's poetry theresult of an urgent need for a metrical utterance?
A careful reading of Mr Kipling's verse, comparing it subject forsubject with his prose, soon convinces us that, far from being a moredirect passionate and living utterance than his prose, it is invariablymore wrought and careful and elaborate. It does not suggest the poetdriven into song. It suggests rather the skilful writer borrowing themanner of a poet, playing, as it were, with the poet's tools, withoutany urgent impulse to express himself in that particular way. He hasmerely added to the number of rules to be successfully observed. Ofhis technical success there is seldom any doubt at all. For acraftsman who can use all the intricate resources of good prosesuccessfully to create an illusion that he is inspired in his leastabandoned moments, it is child's play to use the more obvious devicesof the metrician to similar effect. So far as mere formal excellenceis concerned, verse is a journeyman's matter as compared with prose;and it is not at all astonishing to find that the formal part of poetrytroubles Mr Kipling not at all. But we must look beyond the formalityof verse to find a poet. Poetry flies higher than prose only when thepoet's feeling has driven him to sing what he cannot say. Mr Kiplingis a wonderful metrician; but that is not the question. The questionis, Where shall we find the most immediate union of the author'sfeeling with the author's expression? And the answer to that will be,Not in the author's poems.
Take as an example the English motive:
"See you our little mill that clacks, So busy by the brook? She has ground her corn and paid her tax Ever since Domesday Book."
Compare this well-wrought stanza with the prose tale _Below the MillDam_, or with the passage it paraphrases in the story to which itstands as motto:
"The English are a bold people. His Saxons would laugh and jest withHugh, and Hugh with them, and--this was marvellous to me--if even themeanest of them said such and such a thing was the Custom of the Manor,then straightway would Hugh and such old men of the Manor as might benear forsake everything else to debate the matter--I have seen themstop the mill with the corn half ground--and if the custom or usagewere proven to be as it was said, why, that was the end of it, eventhough it were flat against Hugh, his wish and command."
It may be said of the verse that, possibly, it is more carefullyconsidered than the prose, more deliberate and formally more excellent.But it is certainly more remote from the passion it conveys. There ismore drive in a single fragment of_ An Habitation Enforced_ than in allthe songs of Puck.
Similarly let us take another of Mr Kipling's themes--his delight inthe world's work. Think first of _The Bridge-Builders_ and of _Williamthe Conqueror_ and then turn to _The Bell Buoy_ (_Five Nations_) or_The White Man's Burden_ (_Five Nations_). In each case--and we repeatthe result every time the experiment is made--we find that the author'smotive, which lives in his prose, tends in his verse to expire. In_The White Man's Burden_ it expires outright, so that reading it, it isdifficult to realise that _William the Conqueror_ has had the power sodeeply to move us.
This is true even where Mr Kipling's subject, which in prose has nottaken him to the top of his achievement, has in verse taken him as highas in verse he is able to go. Mr Kipling's best verse is contained in_Barrack Room Ballads_; but even these do not compare in merit with_Soldiers Three_. _Barrack Room Ballads_ are the best of Mr Kipling'spoetry, because in these poems rhyme and beat are essential to theirinspiration. They are the exception which prove the rule that normallyMr Kipling has no right to his metre. _Barrack Room Ballads_ arerobust and vivid songs of the camp, choruses which require no music toenable them to serve the purpose of any gathering where the first ideais that there should be a cheerful noise. Complete success in thiskind only required Mr Kipling to fill in the skeleton of a metre whichbrings the right words at the right moment to the tip of the gallopingtongue, and this he has admirably done.
Where in _Barrack Room Ballads_ Mr Kipling has attempted to do morethan fill up the feet of an irresponsible line, his verse only succeedsin defining the weakness, in a corresponding kind, of his prose. Wehave seen that one weakness of his soldier tales is their over emphasisof the brutal aspect of war, natural in an author of sensitiveimagination attempting to identify himself with the soldier's point ofview. In the prose tales this exaggeration is only occasional. In_Barrack Room Ballads_ it is more pronounced.
We may take three stanzas of _Snarleyow_ as evidence that Mr Kipling's_Barrack Room Ballads_, unlike the songs of Puck and the greater massof his verse, _really had to be metrical_; also as evidence that, in sofar as they attempt to be more than a galloping chorus in dialect theyare less admirable than the adventures of Ortheris and Mulvaney. TheBattery was charging into action and the Driver had just been sayingthat a Battery was hard to pull up when it was taking the field:
"'E 'adn't 'ardly spoke the word, before a droppin' shell A little right the battery an' between the sections fell; An' when the smoke 'ad cleared away, before the limber wheels, There lay the Driver's Brother with 'is 'ead between 'is 'eels.
"Then sez the Driver's Brother, an' 'is words was very plain, 'For Gawd's own sake get over me, an' put me out o' pain.' They saw 'is wounds was mortial, an' they judged that it was best, So they took an' drove the limber straight across 'is back an' chest.
"The Driver 'e give nothin' 'cept a little coughin' grunt, But 'e swung 'is 'orses 'andsome when it came to 'Action Front!' An' if one wheel was juicy, you may lay your Monday head 'Twas juicier for the niggers when the case began to spread."
The brutality in this incident is forced in idea and expression beyondanything we find in _Soldiers Three_. It is this continuous _forcing_of idea and expression which persists in virtually all Mr Kipling'sverse except where the jingle is all that matters. We have only torecall recitations from the platform or before the curtain of some ofMr Kipling's popular poetry to realise, sometimes a little painfully,that verse is for him not a threshold of the authentic Hall of Song,but, too often, a door out of reality into the sentimental andoverwrought.
Comparing the soldier tales and the soldier songs it is often possible,however, to miss the author's flagging, because, as we have seen, thesoldier songs are the best songs, whereas the soldier tales are not thebest tales. The full extent of the inferiority of Mr Kipling's verseto Mr Kipling's prose cannot, however, be missed if we compare thefiner grain of Mr Kipling's prose with the poems that deal with similarthemes. Read first _The Story of Ung_ (_The Seven Seas_) andafterwards the tale of the Flint Man found upon the Downs by Dan andUna (_Rewards and Fairies_). Or, to take an even more tellinginstance, reca
ll the most perfect of all Mr Kipling's tales _TheMiracle of Purun Bhagat_, and afterwards read the poem that is proudlyset at the head of it:
"The night we felt the earth would move We stole and plucked him by the hand, Because we loved him with the love That knows but cannot understand.
"And when the roaring hillside broke, And all our world fell down in rain, We saved him, we the Little Folk; But lo! he does not come again!
"Mourn now, we saved him for the sake Of such poor love as wild ones may. Mourn ye! Our brother will not wake, And his own kind drive us away!" --_Dirge of the Langurs._
The poem is excellent cold craft, but leaves us precisely in the stateof mind in which it found us. The story which follows it is rooted inthe same idea; but, where the one is a literary exercise, the other isa supreme feat of imagination.
Here, with _The Miracle of Purun Bhagat_, the story itself and not thedirge of the Langurs, we may conveniently leave the reputation of ourauthor. Critics of a future generation may need to apologise forincluding within the limits of a brief monograph a specific chapterupon Mr Kipling's verse. They will not need to apologise for itsbrevity.