Down the plantain-bordered highway,
(Heaven send it ne’er be my way!)
In a lacquered box and jetty upon wheels.
Answer, sombre beast and dreary,
Where is Brown, the young, the cheery,
Smith, the pride of all his friends and half the Force?
You were at that last dread dak
We must cover at a walk,
Bring them back to me, O Undertaker’s Horse!
With your mane unhogged and flowing,
And your curious way of going,
And that businesslike black crimping of your tail,
E’en with Beauty on your back, Sir,
Pacing as a lady’s hack, Sir,
What wonder when I meet you I turn pale?
It may be you wait your time, Beast,
Till I write my last bad rhyme, Beast —
Quit the sunlight, cut the rhyming, drop the glass —
Follow after with the others,
Where some dusky heathen smothers
Us with marigolds in lieu of English grass.
Or, perchance, in years to follow,
I shall watch your plump sides hollow,
See Carnifex (gone lame) become a corse —
See old age at last o’erpower you,
And the Station Pack devour you,
I shall chuckle then, O Undertaker’s Horse!
But to insult, jibe, and quest, I’ve
Still the hideously suggestive
Trot that hammers out the unrelenting text,
And I hear it hard behind me
In what place soe’er I find me: —
“‘Sure to catch you sooner or later. Who’s the next?”
Untimely
“The Eye of Allah”
From “Debits and Credits” (1919-1923)
Nothing in life has been made by man for man’s using
But it was shown long since to man in ages
Lost as the name of the maker of it,
Who received oppression and shame for his wages —
Hate, avoidance, and scorn in his daily dealings —
Until he perished, wholly confounded
More to be pitied than he are the wise
Souls which foresaw the evil of loosing
Knowledge or Art before time, and aborted
Noble devices and deep-wrought healings,
Lest offence should arise.
Heaven delivers on earth the Hour that cannot be
thwarted,
Neither advanced, at the price of a world nor a soul,
and its Prophet
Comes through the blood of the vanguards who
dreamed — too soon — it had sounded.
The Vampire
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.
Very Many People
1926
ON THE Downs, in the Weald, on the Marshes,
1 heard the Old Gods say:
“Here come Very Many People:
“We must go away.
“They take our land to delight in,
“But their delight destroys.
“They flay the turf from the sheep-walk.
“They load the Denes with noise.
“They burn coal in the woodland.
“They seize the oast and the mill.
“They camp beside Our dew-ponds.
“They mar the clean-flanked hill.
“They string a clamorous Magic
“To fence their souls from thought,
“Till Our deep-breathed Oaks are silent,
“And Our muttering Downs tell nought.
“They comfort themselves with neighbours.
“They cannot bide alone.
“It shall be best for their doings
“When We Old Gods are gone.”
Farewell to the Downs and the Marshes,
And the Weald and the Forest known
Before there were Very Many People,
And the Old Gods had gone!
The Verdicts
(Justland)
1916
Not in the thick of the fight,
Not in the press of the odds,
Do the heroes come to their height,
Or we know the demi-gods.
That stands over till peace.
We can only perceive
Men returned from the seas,
Very grateful for leave.
They grant us sudden days
Snatched from their business of war;
But we are too close to appraise
What manner of men they are.
And, whether their names go down
With age-kept victories,
Or whether they battle and drown
Unreckoned, is hid from our eyes.
They are too near to be great,
But our children shall understand
When and how our fate
Was changed, and by whose hand.
Our children shall measure their worth.
We are content to be blind . . .
But we know that we walk on a new-born earth
With the saviours of mankind.
The Veterans
Written for the Gathering of Survivors the Indian Mutiny,
Albert Hall, 1907
To-day, across our fathers’ graves,
The astonished years reveal
The remnant of that desperate host
Which cleansed our East with steel.
Hail and farewell! We greet you here,
With tears that none will scorn —
O Keepers of the House of old,
Or ever we were born!
One service more we dare to ask —
Pray for us, heroes, pray,
That when Fate lays on us our task
We do not shame the Day!
The Vineyard
“Sea Constables”
From “Debits and Credits” (1919-1923)
At the eleventh hour he came,
But his wages were the same
As ours who all day long had trod
The wine-press of the Wrath of God.
When he shouldered through the lines
Of our cropped and mangled vines,
His unjaded eye could scan
How each hour had marked its man.
(Children of the morning-tide
With the hosts of noon had died,
And o
ur noon contingents lay
Dead with twilight’s spent array.)
Since his back had felt no load ,
Virtue still in him abode;
So he swiftly made his own
Those last spoils we had not won.
We went home, delivered thence,
Grudging him no recompense
Till he portioned praise or blame
To our works before he came.
Till he showed us for our good —
Deaf to mirth, and blind to scorn —
How we might have best withstood
Burdens that he had not born!
The Virginity
Try as he will, no man breaks wholly loose
From his first love, no matter who she be.
Oh, was there ever sailor free to choose,
That didn’t settle somewhere near the sea?
Myself, it don’t excite me nor amuse
To watch a pack o’ shipping on the sea;
But I can understand my neighbour’s views
From certain things which have occured to me.
Men must keep touch with things they used to use
To earn their living, even when they are free;
And so come back upon the least excuse —
Same as the sailor settled near the sea.
He knows he’s never going on no cruise —
He knows he’s done and finished with the sea;
And yet he likes to feel she’s there to use —
If he should ask her — as she used to be.
Even though she cost him all he had to lose,
Even though she made him sick to hear or see,
Still, what she left of him will mostly choose
Her skirts to sit by. How comes such to be?
Parsons in pulpits, tax-payers in pews,
Kings on your thrones, you know as well as me,
We’ve only one virginity to lose,
And where we lost it there our hearts will be!
The Voortrekker
The gull shall whistle in his wake, the blind wave break in fire.
He shall fulfil God’s utmost will, unknowing His desire.
And he shall see old planets change and alien stars arise,
And give the gale his seaworn sail in shadow of new skies.
Strong lust of gear shall drive him forth and hunger arm his hand,
To win his food from the desert rude, his pittance from the sand.
His neighbours’ smoke shall vex his eyes, their voices break his rest.
He shall go forth till south is north, sullen and dispossessed.
He shall desire loneliness and his desire shall bring,
Hard on his heels, a thousand wheels, a People and a King.
He shall come back on his own track, and by his scarce-cooled camp
There shall he meet the roaring street, the derrick and the stamp:
There he shall blaze a nation’s ways with hatchet and with brand,
Till on his last-won wilderness an Empire’s outposts stand!
The Wage-Slaves
1902
Oh, glorious are the guarded heights
Where guardian souls abide —
Self-exiled from our gross delights —
Above, beyond, outside:
An ampler arc their spirit swings —
Commands a juster view —
We have their word for all these things,
No doubt their words are true.
Yet we, the bond slaves of our day,
Whom dirt and danger press —
Co-heirs of insolence, delay,
And leagued unfaithfulness —
Such is our need must seek indeed
And, having found, engage
The men who merely do the work
For which they draw the wage.
From forge and farm and mine and bench,
Deck, altar, outpost lone —
Mill, school, battalion, counter, trench,
Rail, senate, sheepfold, throne —
Creation’s cry goes up on high
From age to cheated age:
“Send us the men who do the work
“For which they draw the wage!”
Words cannot help nor wit achieve,
Nor e’en the all-gifted fool,
Too weak to enter, bide, or leave
The lists he cannot rule.
Beneath the sun we count on none
Our evil to assuage,
Except the men that do the work
For which they draw the wage.
When through the Gates of Stress and Strain
Comes forth the vast Event —
The simple, sheer, sufficing, sane
Result of labour spent —
They that have wrought the end unthought
Be neither saint nor sage,
But only men who did the work
For which they drew the wage.
Wherefore to these the Fates shall bend
(And all old idle things )
Werefore on these shall Power attend
Beyond the grip of kings:
Each in his place, by right, not grace,
Shall rule his heritage —
The men who simply do the work
For which they draw the wage.
Not such as scorn the loitering street,
Or waste, to earth its praise,
Their noontide’s unreturning heat
About their morning ways;
But such as dower each mortgaged hour
Alike with clean courage —
Even the men who do the work
For which they draw the wage —
Men, like to Gods, that do the work
For which they draw the wage —
Begin-continue-close that work
For which they draw the wage!
The Waster
1930
From the date that the doors of his prep-school close
On the lonely little son
He is taught by precept, insult, and blows
The Things that Are Never Done.
Year after year, without favour or fear,
From seven to twenty-two,
His keepers insist he shall learn the list
Of the things no fellow can do.
(They are not so strict with the average Pict
And it isn’t set to, etc.)
For this and not for the profit it brings
Or the good of his fellow-kind
He is and suffers unspeakable things
In body and soul and mind.
But the net result of that Primitive Cult,
Whatever else may be won,
Is definite knowledge ere leaving College,
Of the Things that Are Never Done.
(An interdict which is strange to the Pict
And was never revealed to, etc.)
Slack by training and slow by birth,
Only quick to despise,
Largely assessing his neighbour’s worth
By the hue of his socks or ties,
A loafer-in-grain, his foes maintain,
And how shall we combat their view
When, atop of his natural sloth, he holds
There are Things no Fellow can do?
(Which is why he is licked from the first by the Pict
And left at the post by, etc.)
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 e
nter 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.
We and They
“A Friend of the Family”
From “Debits and Credits”(1919-1923)
Father and Mother, and Me,
Sister and Auntie say
All the people like us are We,
And every one else is They.
And They live over the sea,
While We live over the way,
But-would you believe it? — They look upon We
As only a sort of They!
We eat pork and beef
With cow-horn-handled knives.
They who gobble Their rice off a leaf,
Are horrified out of Their lives;
While they who live up a tree,
And feast on grubs and clay,
(Isn’t it scandalous? ) look upon We
As a simply disgusting They!
We shoot birds with a gun.
They stick lions with spears.
Their full-dress is un-.
We dress up to Our ears.
They like Their friends for tea.
We like Our friends to stay;
And, after all that, They look upon We
As an utterly ignorant They!
We eat kitcheny food.
We have doors that latch.
They drink milk or blood,
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 816