First of all, I should mention that these notes are written in haste. The Norwegian government although pretending to promote social democratic values had adopted the ‘new public management’ philosophy of Reagan and Thatcher. I won’t delve into this here, but I seem to remember that Thatcher’s parents were grocers. Obviously, grocers have to make a ‘profit’; this ideology was introduced into the public sector. To cut a long story short, I was employed between 1980 and 2020 by the Norwegian state on various short-term contracts over a period of 40 years, despite the fact that Norwegian law made it illegal to employ people on temporary contracts of more than four years. But Norway is not the worst case here. The Conservative British government, despite the Covid-19 crisis, has undermined the health services for many years in the name of ‘austerity and make the rich richer’. But my intention here is not to embark on a political rant but to explain why my lecture notes were often just a regurgitation of information that could be found on various websites; ironically, my ‘original’ contributions were not always appreciated by students as they had various religious and cultural hang ups, and didn’t appreciate a ‘new’ appreciation of old texts.

These ‘draft notes’ were first written in 2011 for a class of students I taught at Telemark University college. The references are incomplete. Moreover, some of the websites I have referred to in 2011 seem to have disappeared in 2022. This reflects the impermanent nature of the Internet. In other words, it is not always easy to trace the sources of the notes some 11 years later.

Rudyard Kipling’s “Mandalay” – Notes by George Bliar^[2]

The poem or ballad is about a British soldier of the Empire who tells a story in the first person. He is now in London but looks back on his life abroad, especially a girl he knew, when he was serving as a soldier in Burma (Myanmar).

His life in London is tedious:

I am sick ‘o wastin’ leather on these gritty pavin’-stones,
An’ the blasted English drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
(verse 5)

He is also fed up with the women he meets in London:

Tho’ I walks with fifty ‘ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An’ they talks a lot o’ lovin’, but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an’ grubby ‘and–
Law! wot do they understand?
(verse 5)

And he misses the girl he knew in Burma:

I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

(verse 5)

Part of the attraction of the poem is perhaps because it appeals to the vanity of men, and also to a life free of day-to-day responsibilities. In a faraway land there is a woman …

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea,
There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say;
“Come you back, you British Soldier; come you back to Mandalay!”

The narrator is a British soldier; he is at one and the same time a particular soldier or any soldier; he doesn’t even have to be British, but a soldier of any invading army. He is also a specific man, but at the same time any man. This at least is the most likely the intent of the author and the perception of many of the male readers of this popular poem. Some readers will read it at face value – the civilising effect of the British Army and Empire, and the romantic yearnings of a British soldier for a girl in a foreign land. Other readers will interpret the poem as a cheap, jingoist ditty written by a male chauvinist for other male chauvinists. In the following, the narrator will therefore be termed ‘male narrator/reader’.

Unlike the soldier’s wife/girlfriend, the girl only ‘think(s) o’ me’; she doesn’t demand anything of the male narrator/reader, except to be an object of adoration. She is also young and beautiful, and promises an exciting and most likely illicit/forbidden sexuality. Her smoking of cheroots places her in a certain category of women from a Western male viewpoint; the reference to her ‘yellow petticoat’ also reinforces the ‘light pornographic’ aspect (in Victorian terms). The description of the girl is wholly the man’s sexual remembrance of her, and the reason for her existence is to gratify his wishes (within the context of the ballad). Outside of the romantic remembrance of the soldier/man she doesn’t seem to have any life. She is in Victorian terms a light-pornographic image (although perhaps from a 2005 perspective she fits more neatly in a ‘tourist brochure image’).

‘Er petticoat was yaller an’ ‘er little cap was green,
An’ ‘er name was Supi-Yaw-Lat, jes’ the same as Theebaw’s Queen,
An’ I seed her first a-smokin’ of a whackin’ white cheroot,
(verse 2)

Her ‘other life’ outside of the man’s desires is hinted at. She is a Buddhist, but this life is relegated to almost zero in relation to her promiscuous-like relation to the soldier/man. Her ‘cheroot-smokin’ and her desire for the soldier/man’s kisses reflects her ‘real’ erotic/subservient nature, and portrays her religion and perhaps culture as being a mere sham. The word ‘heathen’ is especially interesting in this context. The dictionary definition of the word seems to reveal a history of western cultural arrogance and domination, which was a hallmark of the British Empire.

‘Heathen’ (definition). “a person who does not belong to a widely held religion (especially one who is not a Christian, Jew or Muslim) … an unenlightened person, a person regarded as lacking cultural or moral principles” (New Oxford Dictionary).

It is perhaps implicitly Kipling rather than ‘the soldier’ who shows religious and cultural intolerance in this instance.^[3]

An’ wastin’ Christian kisses on an ‘eathen idol’s foot:
Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud–
Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd–
Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed ‘er where she stud!

(verse 2)

Her cheroot-smoking suggests that she may be a prostitute, although an explicit romantic image associated with prostitution would be censored from Victorian poetry. Whatever she may be, she seems to evoke the countless women through the ages who for reasons of poverty rather than love gather at places such as harbours “lookin lazily at the sea” for soldiers and sailors to arrive on ships^[4]; even when these same soldiers have perhaps been directly, or indirectly, responsible for causing their poverty (as might be said to be the case concerning the British colonialisation of Burma). Ironically, the soldier in the poem is without a name, he is any and every soldier; similarly, the cheroot-smoking girl is any girl/prostitute waiting for a soldier. While soldiers may meet women abroad, fall in love, and marry them, they probably more often have relationships which are of a more pecuniary nature. The participants in such relationships are perhaps not always honest concerning the true nature of their relationships. The author Kipling is at a distance from the narrator of the poem – a distance of social class. The cockney lingo of the soldier signals this. It is not unusual for male sexuality to be expressed in literature and poetry using a ‘distancing effect’ from the author’s own personal life/class, for instance, through the vehicle of a lower social class, or ethnic group.

Her role of fulfilling the soldier’s/man’s desires is continued in the poem when her banjo playing is referred to. Victorian prudery excludes perhaps any images which are too obviously erotic or pornographic. However, her banjo playing and singing, the physical contact between the soldier and girl; the description of her yellow petticoat; and her cheroot smoking are not mere descriptions; they suggest a readiness to enjoy life and its pleasures, far away from the soldier’s dull life in London:

Colonial exploitation of a country’s natural resources

The real purpose of the soldier’s presence in Burma, ‘pilin’ teak’, is only mentioned inadvertently in the poem. The following extract from Amitav Ghosh’s “The Glass Palace” comments on the British Empire’s exploitation of Burma’s “valuable natural resources – teak, ivory, petroleum”:

Forgotten and abandoned, the king and queen led a life of increasing shabbiness and obscurity in an unfamiliar territory while their country got depleted of its valuable natural resources – teak, ivory, petroleum. The rapacity and greed inherent in the colonial process is seen concentrated in what happened in Burma, and the author does not gloss over the fact that Indians were willing collaborators in this British enterprise of depredation.^[5]

The girl’s ‘young charms’ are emphasised and they contrast with the grey life of the older soldier in London: “An’ I’m learnin’ ‘ere in London what the ten-year soldier tells:” (verse 4)

She understands his needs, whereas the English women don’t, and neither are they pretty:

Tho’ I walks with fifty ‘ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An’ they talks a lot o’ lovin’, but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an’ grubby ‘and–
Law! wot do they understand?

The style of a ballad demands perhaps that women are ‘maidens’. This ballad/poem is no exception:

I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

However, there is an unintended irony here, because it seems unlikely that a young prostitute could also be a virgin.

Traditionally, in literature and poetry, England is often called a ‘green land’:

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon England’s mountains green:

And was the holy Lamb of God,

On England’s pleasant pastures seen!^[6]

The poem implies that England (London) is dirty: “these gritty pavin’-stones.” This was the consequence of 150 years of industrialisation,^[7] which also necessitated the invasion of foreign countries (colonies) in order to establish markets and acquire raw material to feed the industrialism.

Mandalay is a cleaner, greener land because the narrator is a soldier who invades and conquers it. He conquers the land and tastes the pleasures the land can offer in the form of the woman, who symbolises the fruits of the land which may be stolen by the invaders. He performs a rape by ‘consent’.

” For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say;
“Come you back, you British Soldier; come you back to Mandalay!”

These two lines in the first verse seem to refer to the thoughts of the girl, or any girl in an invaded country. In a wider context they refer to the country, although this seems to be the author’s/‘British’ point of view rather than the genuine view of the inhabitants of a country that has been invaded, occupied and colonialized – a rape without consent. The British/Kipling’s/soldier’s viewpoint is then a piece of rationalisation, the mental gymnastics often performed by invading countries when they are clearly morally wrong. In this case the ‘smokescreen’ camouflaging the brutal, violent and immoral invasion of a country is a romantic vision.

Interestingly, in the nineteenth century Britain brought civilisation to the ‘heathens’. In the twentieth and the twentieth-first centuries western countries are ‘democratising’ rather than civilising countries they invade.

The soldier/man is bound by the laws and morals of the society he lives in. The trammels of society might be said to be symbolised by:

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,

Where there ain’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst;

(verse 6)

In other words, the soldier when abroad feels that he has been freed from the moral Christian straitjacket of his home country. The soldier/man is tired of his duties and responsibilities, and the rewards or lack of rewards they offer, as symbolised by the ‘non-feminine/non-understanding Chelsea housemaids. It is a fairly common occurrence we read in the ‘world news’ everyday of soldiers who invade foreign countries who no longer feel bound and restricted by conventional morality, and who commit violent acts towards women and children. War and invasions seems to erode the laws of society which make us ‘civilised’. The narrator desires to live-out the other half of his ‘self’, which is censored/held in check by society as symbolised by the “Ten Commandments”. He wants to travel somewhere where he will no longer be bound by morality – i.e. amongst the ‘heathens’. His ‘thirst’ refers perhaps to a thirst for life, a ‘sensual and erotic thirst’.

To the modern reader, this conjures up images of the modern tourist sex-trade, which is now widely established in Asia for European ‘tourists’ and soldiers (for instance, the thriving sex-trade in Vietnam during the American invasion of that country). This sex-trade is also especially popular with older men as hinted at in the poem.

These older sex-tourists can get far away ‘east of Suez’ from the women of their own country who may demand some kind of equality in a relationship, expressed in the poem as women with “Beefy face an’ grubby ‘and—” (verse 5); this perhaps indicates the narrator’s chauvinistic view of their femininity as being ‘masculine’, and their grubby hands as symbolising the drudgery of their family and working lives.

The mention of the Suez Canal again inadvertently introduces the ‘beneficial’ effects of Empire. The Suez Canal was the main artery for trade between East and West, and was eventually bought by the British, then ‘lost’ in a colonial war in the 1950s.

Don’t fraternise with the ‘natives’

The undercurrent of the ballad is that the invasion and occupation of the country by the British was something which was welcomed by the Burmese. This resulted in an easy relationship between the governed and the rulers with social intermingling. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The British did not ‘fraternise’ with the ‘natives’ in the East. They ‘imported’ their wives from Britain, and socially mixed with other British colonials in their clubs (see the writings of George Orwell, for instance, Burmese Days). Kipling lets the British soldier ‘fraternise’ with a local girl. This is hypocritical and patronising towards both the British working class soldiers and the inhabitants of the country. The social and moral codes that governed the behaviour of middle and upper class British (officer class) did not apply to the working class British soldiers and the inhabitants of the colonialised country. Thus, the officer class could not publicly fraternise with the women of the invaded country (although they kept mistresses, such as John Flory’s Burmese mistress Ma Hla May in Orwell’s novel, “Burmese Days”.

A description of the principle of non-fraternisation with colonial subjects:

Britain’s colonies around the world spawned generations of European settlers who were born, had married and died there, living a life of luxury enjoyed only by the wealthy in their distant homeland. A comparatively recent addition to the British Empire, Burma was no exception.

A cardinal rule of the Governors of Empire in the early twentieth century was that Europeans should not fraternise with natives of the territory they controlled, but live socially segregated in Cantonment and Club. This was deemed vital to maintain the subtle atmosphere of superiority needed to govern and live in peace with millions of subject peoples with a minimum of effort and cost. Those seen to break this rule had virtually no chance of promotion to a senior job, or if they had one, were banned from the exclusive cantonments where Sahib and Memsahib, surrounded by servants, lived sheltered lives in a little Scotland, Wales or England, before going home in disgrace.

http://www.shareholderpower.com/legacy_links.html^[8]

British colonial soldiers and sexually transmitted diseases

That ‘fraternisation’ was more or less forbidden, reinforces the idea that the girl was a prostitute. Also, Kipling was concerned about British soldiers in the colonies who caught sexual transmitted diseases from the prostitutes of the occupied countries. He was not so much concerned about the welfare of the soldiers (or the girls) but the cost to the British – at least this is expressed in the following:

Kipling took up the causes of the rank and file in his journalism. For example, he campaigned for a more realistic approach to sex. The soldiers often used the services of local bazaar prostitutes, but the authorities made little attempt to inspect the girls involved, with the result, Kipling argued, that there were nine thousand “expensive white men a year always laid from venereal disease.” http://www.ereader.com/product/book/excerpt/12833^[9]

A more up-to-date source:

Veneral disease and the Lock Hospitals

As Kipling said in his autobiography, “Something Of Myself” :

“it was counted impious that bazaar prostitutes should be inspected or that the men be taught elementary precautions in dealing with them . This official virtue cost our Army in India nine thousand expensive white men a year laid up with venereal disease.”

Venereal disease was one of the most frequent causes of admission to hospital among British troops in India throughout the nineteenth century. Most of the men and approximately two thirds of the officers were unmarried and prostitutes provided “a vitally important form of relaxation”. The military authorities recognised this and so did not forbid access to prostitutes.^[10]

The patronising attitude of the author towards the working classes is perhaps most clearly reflected in the attempt to phonetically reproduce the language of the Cockney. This is something which was observed by George Orwell in his essay “Rudyard Kipling” (see below):

This is impossible to Kipling, who is looking down a distorting class-perspective, and by a piece of poetic justice one of his best lines is spoiled — for ‘follow me ’ome’ is much uglier than ‘follow me home’. But even where it makes no difference musically the facetiousness of his stage Cockney dialect is irritating.

Few authors attempted traditionally to reproduce working class speech in writing, and the majority who did were perhaps from the middle classes.

The poem seems to anticipate G.B.Shaw’s Pygmalion. Although, Shaw and Kipling were supposedly from opposing ends of the political spectrum, they both attempted to present what they felt were sympathetic portraits of the working classes. However, their phonetic transcriptions of Cockney language exhibit patronising attitudes, which may be expected of the conservative Kipling, but not of the ‘socialist’, Shaw. There is a common misunderstanding (which is often reflected in British school syllabuses) that standard spoken English has its mirror reflection with standard written English, whereas, regional and ‘social’ dialects do not. It is therefore in a pedantic’/middleclass’/schools’ context not grammatical to say or write “he ain’t not done it”, because it is grammatically incorrect (a double negative, and because ‘ain’t’ should be spoken/written “has /hэz/ not”). Shaw writes the Cockney dialect phonetically, yet makes no attempt to write the middle class dialect phonetically (though why not, as he wanted to introduce a new system of spelling, and was obviously aware of the lack of correspondence between ‘standard written and spoken English’). One of the main humorous elements in Shaw’s play is the mockery of Eliza’s non-standard English of Eliza, which would allow the middle class audiences to patronisingly laugh (although Shaw purports to be a Socialist and intends to participate in the ‘class struggle’, he portrays Cockney speech unsympathetically). Similarly, the soldier in “Mandalay” is different from us and interesting from our patronising point of view because of his speech.

The main element of this Cockney speech is the dropping of aitches (as Orwell notes):

An’ ‘er name

‘eathen

‘er where she stud!

She’d git ‘er little banjo

She’d git ‘er little banjo an’ she’d sing “Kulla-la-lo!”
With ‘er arm upon my shoulder an’ ‘er cheek again my cheek

Where the silence ‘ung that ‘eavy you was ‘arf afraid to speak!

Other comical, patronising transcriptions of Cockney speech are:

‘Wot’ and ‘Gawd’.

This ‘written Cockney’ is reinforced in contrast with the standard written English which appears for a few lines:

For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say;
“Come you back, you British Soldier; come you back to Mandalay!”
Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay;

It is unclear who is the speaker here of the standard English (the ‘temple-bells’, or a second third person narrator?). However, this will go unnoticed on an ‘ordinary’ reading of the poem, and was perhaps also ‘unnoticed’ by Kipling. The standard English, however, serves to reinforce the different aspect of the Cockney English.

A discussion which has not been entered into here is the recent theories concerning the Theory of the Other of Edward Said. A thorough analysis of the poem would beg the use of this theory. For instance, consider Nandi Bhatia’s article, ‘Kipling’s Burden: Representing Colonial Authority and Constructing the “Other” through Kimball O’Hara and Babu Hurree Chander in Kim’.

“Rudyard Kipling”^[11] ^[12] by George Orwell

It was a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling’s poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shallow and familiar charge that Kipling is a ‘Fascist’, he falls into the opposite error of defending him where he is not defensible. It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person. It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a ‘nigger’ with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling’s work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct — on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have. Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.

And yet the ‘Fascist’ charge has to be answered, because the first clue to any understanding of Kipling, morally or politically, is the fact that he was not a Fascist. He was further from being one than the most humane or the most ‘progressive’ person is able to be nowadays. An interesting instance of the way in which quotations are parroted to and fro without any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning is the line from (Kipling’s poem) ‘Recessional’, ‘Lesser breeds without the Law’. This line is always good for a snigger in pansy-left circles. It is assumed as a matter of course that the ‘lesser breeds’ are ‘natives’, and a mental picture is called up of some pukka sahib in a pith helmet kicking a coolie. In its context the sense of the line is almost the exact opposite of this. The phrase ‘lesser breeds’ refers almost certainly to the Germans, and especially the pan-German writers, who are ‘without the Law’ in the sense of being lawless, not in the sense of being powerless. The whole poem, conventionally thought of as an orgy of boasting, is a denunciation of power politics, British as well as German. Two stanzas are worth quoting (I am quoting this as politics, not as poetry):

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!

Much of Kipling’s phraseology is taken from the Bible, and no doubt in the second stanza he had in mind the text from Psalm CXXVII: ‘Except the lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’ It is not a text that makes much impression on the post-Hitler mind. No one, in our time, believes in any sanction greater than military power; no one believes that it is possible to overcome force except by greater force. There is no ‘Law’, there is only power. I am not saying that that is a true belief, merely that it is the belief which all modern men do actually hold. Those who pretend otherwise are either intellectual cowards, or power-worshippers under a thin disguise, or have simply not caught up with the age they are living in. Kipling’s outlook is prefascist. He still believes that pride comes before a fall and that the gods punish hubris. He does not foresee the tank, the bombing plane, the radio and the secret police, or their psychological results.

But in saying this, does not one unsay what I said above about Kipling’s jingoism and brutality? No, one is merely saying that the nineteenth-century imperialist outlook and the modern gangster outlook are two different things. Kipling belongs very definitely to the period 1885-1902. The Great War and its aftermath embittered him, but he shows little sign of having learned anything from any event later than the Boer War. He was the prophet of British Imperialism in its expansionist phase (even more than his poems, his solitary novel, The Light that Failed, gives you the atmosphere of that time) and also the unofficial historian of the British Army, the old mercenary army which began to change its shape in 1914. All his confidence, his bouncing vulgar vitality, sprang out of limitations which no Fascist or near-Fascist shares.

Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was political disappointment rather than literary vanity that account for this. Somehow history had not gone according to plan. After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before, and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this. The virtue had gone out of the classes he idealized, the young were hedonistic or disaffected, the desire to paint the map red had evaporated. He could not understand what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern. Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed ‘natives’, and then you establish ‘the Law’, which includes roads, railways and a court-house. He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it. It was the same motive, for example, that caused the Malayan jungles to be cleared for rubber estates, and which now causes those estates to be handed over intact to the Japanese. The modern totalitarians know what they are doing, and the nineteenth-century English did not know what they were doing. Both attitudes have their advantages, but Kipling was never able to move forward from one into the other. His outlook, allowing for the fact that after all he was an artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat who despises the ‘box-wallah’ and often lives a lifetime without realizing that the ‘box-wallah’ calls the tune.

But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which ‘enlightened’ people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling’s understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase, ‘making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep’. It is true that Kipling does not understand the economic aspect of the relationship between the highbrow and the blimp. He does not see that the map is painted red chiefly in order that the coolie may be exploited. Instead of the coolie he sees the Indian Civil Servant; but even on that plane his grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

How far does Kipling really identify himself with the administrators, soldiers and engineers whose praises he sings? Not so completely as is sometimes assumed. He had travelled very widely while he was still a young man, he had grown up with a brilliant mind in mainly philistine surroundings, and some streak in him that may have been partly neurotic led him to prefer the active man to the sensitive man. The nineteenth-century Anglo-Indians, to name the least sympathetic of his idols, were at any rate people who did things. It may be that all that they did was evil, but they changed the face of the earth (it is instructive to look at a map of Asia and compare the railway system of India with that of the surrounding countries), whereas they could have achieved nothing, could not have maintained themselves in power for a single week, if the normal Anglo-Indian outlook had been that of, say, E.M. Forster. Tawdry and shallow though it is, Kipling’s is the only literary picture that we possess of nineteenth-century Anglo-India, and he could only make it because he was just coarse enough to be able to exist and keep his mouth shut in clubs and regimental messes. But he did not greatly resemble the people he admired. I know from several private sources that many of the Anglo-Indians who were Kipling’s contemporaries did not like or approve of him. They said, no doubt truly, that he knew nothing about India, and on the other hand, he was from their point of view too much of a highbrow. While in India he tended to mix with ‘the wrong’ people, and because of his dark complexion he was wrongly suspected of having a streak of Asiatic blood. Much in his development is traceable to his having been born in India and having left school early. With a slightly different background he might have been a good novelist or a superlative writer of music-hall songs. But how true is it that he was a vulgar flagwaver, a sort of publicity agent for Cecil Rhodes? It is true, but it is not true that he was a yes-man or a time-server. After his early days, if then, he never courted public opinion. Mr. Eliot says that what is held against him is that he expressed unpopular views in a popular style. This narrows the issue by assuming that ‘unpopular’ means unpopular with the intelligentsia, but it is a fact that Kipling’s ‘message’ was one that the big public did not want, and, indeed, has never accepted. The mass of the people, in the nineties as now, were anti-militarist, bored by the Empire, and only unconsciously patriotic. Kipling’s official admirers are and were the ‘service’ middle class, the people who read Blackwood’s. In the stupid early years of this century, the blimps, having at last discovered someone who could be called a poet and who was on their side, set Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as ‘If’, were given almost biblical status. But it is doubtful whether the blimps have ever read him with attention, any more than they have read the Bible. Much of what he says they could not possibly approve. Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot. As a rule it is the British working class that he is attacking, but not always. That phrase about ‘the flannelled fools at the wicket and the muddied oafs at the goal’ sticks like an arrow to this day, and it is aimed at the Eton and Harrow match as well as the Cup-Tie Final. Some of the verses he wrote about the Boer War have a curiously modern ring, so far as their subject-matter goes. ‘Stellenbosch’, which must have been written about 1902, sums up what every intelligent infantry officer was saying in 1918, or is saying now, for that matter.

Kipling’s romantic ideas about England and the Empire might not have mattered if he could have held them without having the class-prejudices which at that time went with them. If one examines his best and most representative work, his soldier poems, especially Barrack-Room Ballads, one notices that what more than anything else spoils them is an underlying air of patronage. Kipling idealizes the army officer, especially the junior officer, and that to an idiotic extent, but the private soldier, though lovable and romantic, has to be a comic. He is always made to speak in a sort of stylized Cockney, not very broad but with all the aitches and final ‘g’s’ carefully omitted. Very often the result is as embarrassing as the humorous recitation at a church social. And this accounts for the curious fact that one can often improve Kipling’s poems, make them less facetious and less blatant, by simply going through them and transplanting them from Cockney into standard speech. This is especially true of his refrains, which often have a truly lyrical quality. Two examples will do (one is about a funeral and the other about a wedding):

So it’s knock out your pipes and follow me!

And it’s finish up your swipes and follow me!

Oh, hark to the big drum calling,

Follow me – follow me home!

and again:

Cheer for the Sergeant’s wedding –

Give them one cheer more!

Grey gun-horses in the lando,

And a rogue is married to a whore!

Here I have restored the aitches, etc. Kipling ought to have known better. He ought to have seen that the two closing lines of the first of these stanzas are very beautiful lines, and that ought to have overriden his impulse to make fun of a working-man’s accent. In the ancient ballads the lord and the peasant speak the same language. This is impossible to Kipling, who is looking down a distorting class-perspective, and by a piece of poetic justice one of his best lines is spoiled — for ‘follow me ’ome’ is much uglier than ‘follow me home’. But even where it makes no difference musically the facetiousness of his stage Cockney dialect is irritating. However, he is more often quoted aloud than read on the printed page, and most people instinctively make the necessary alterations when they quote him.

Can one imagine any private soldier, in the nineties or now, reading Barrack-Room Ballads and feeling that here was a writer who spoke for him? It is very hard to do so. Any soldier capable of reading a book of verse would notice at once that Kipling is almost unconscious of the class war that goes on in an army as much as elsewhere. It is not only that he thinks the soldier comic, but that he thinks him patriotic, feudal, a ready admirer of his officers and proud to be a soldier of the Queen. Of course that is partly true, or battles could not be fought, but ‘What have I done for thee, England, my England?’ is essentially a middle-class query. Almost any working man would follow it up immediately with ‘What has England done for me?’ In so far as Kipling grasps this, he simply sets it down to ‘the intense selfishness of the lower classes’ (his own phrase). When he is writing not of British but of ‘loyal’ Indians he carries the ‘Salaam, sahib’ motif to sometimes disgusting lengths. Yet it remains true that he has far more interest in the common soldier, far more anxiety that he shall get a fair deal, than most of the ‘liberals’ of his day or our own. He sees that the soldier is neglected, meanly underpaid and hypocritically despised by the people whose incomes he safeguards. ‘I came to realize’, he says in his posthumous memoirs, ‘the bare horrors of the private’s life, and the unnecessary torments he endured’. He is accused of glorifying war, and perhaps he does so, but not in the usual manner, by pretending that war is a sort of football match. Like most people capable of writing battle poetry, Kipling had never been in battle, but his vision of war is realistic. He knows that bullets hurt, that under fire everyone is terrified, that the ordinary soldier never knows what the war is about or what is happening except in his own corner of the battlefield, and that British troops, like other troops, frequently run away:

I ’eard the knives be’ind me, but I dursn’t face my man,

Nor I don’t know where I went to, ’cause I didn’t stop to see,

Till I ’eard a beggar squealin’ out for quarter as ’e ran,

An’ I thought I knew the voice an’ – it was me!^[13]

Modernize the style of this, and it might have come out of one of the debunking war books of the nineteen-twenties. Or again:

An’ now the hugly bullets come peckin’ through the dust,

An’ no one wants to face ’em, but every beggar must;

So, like a man in irons, which isn’t glad to go,

They moves ’em off by companies uncommon stiff an’ slow.^[14]

Compare this with:

Forward the Light Brigade!

Was there a man dismayed?

No! though the soldier knew

Someone had blundered.^[15]

If anything, Kipling overdoes the horrors, for the wars of his youth were hardly wars at all by our standards. Perhaps that is due to the neurotic strain in him, the hunger for cruelty. But at least he knows that men ordered to attack impossible objectives are dismayed, and also that fourpence a day is not a generous pension.

How complete or truthful a picture has Kipling left us of the long-service, mercenary army of the late nineteenth century? One must say of this, as of what Kipling wrote about nineteenth-century Anglo-India, that it is not only the best but almost the only literary picture we have. He has put on record an immense amount of stuff that one could otherwise only gather from verbal tradition or from unreadable regimental histories. Perhaps his picture of army life seems fuller and more accurate than it is because any middle-class English person is likely to know enough to fill up the gaps. At any rate, reading the essay on Kipling that Mr. Edmund Wilson has just published or is just about to publish, I was struck by the number of things that are boringly familiar to us and seem to be barely intelligible to an American. But from the body of Kipling’s early work there does seem to emerge a vivid and not seriously misleading picture of the old pre-machine-gun army — the sweltering barracks in Gibraltar or Lucknow, the red coats, the pipeclayed belts and the pillbox hats, the beer, the fights, the floggings, hangings and crucifixions, the bugle-calls, the smell of oats and horsepiss, the bellowing sergeants with foot-long moustaches, the bloody skirmishes, invariably mismanaged, the crowded troopships, the cholera-stricken camps, the ‘native’ concubines, the ultimate death in the workhouse. It is a crude, vulgar picture, in which a patriotic music-hall turn seems to have got mixed up with one of Zola’s gorier passages, but from it future generations will be able to gather some idea of what a long-term volunteer army was like. On about the same level they will be able to learn something of British India in the days when motor-cars and refrigerators were unheard of. It is an error to imagine that we might have had better books on these subjects if, for example, George Moore, or Gissing, or Thomas Hardy, had had Kipling’s opportunities. That is the kind of accident that cannot happen. It was not possible that nineteenth-century England should produce a book like War and Peace, or like Tolstoy’s minor stories of army life, such as Sebastopol or The Cossacks, not because the talent was necessarily lacking but because no one with sufficient sensitiveness to write such books would ever have made the appropriate contacts. Tolstoy lived in a great military empire in which it seemed natural for almost any young man of family to spend a few years in the army, whereas the British Empire was and still is demilitarized to a degree which continental observers find almost incredible. Civilized men do not readily move away from the centres of civilization, and in most languages there is a great dearth of what one might call colonial literature. It took a very improbable combination of circumstances to produce Kipling’s gaudy tableau, in which Private Ortheris and Mrs. Hauksbee pose against a background of palm trees to the sound of temple bells, and one necessary circumstance was that Kipling himself was only half civilized.

Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language. The phrases and neologisms which we take over and use without remembering their origin do not always come from writers we admire. It is strange, for instance, to hear the Nazi broadcasters referring to the Russian soldiers as ‘robots’, thus unconsciously borrowing a word from a Czech democrat whom they would have killed if they could have laid hands on him. Here are half a dozen phrases coined by Kipling which one sees quoted in leaderettes in the gutter press or overhears in saloon bars from people who have barely heard his name. It will be seen that they all have a certain characteristic in common:

East is East, and West is West.

The white man’s burden.

What do they know of England who only England know?

The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Somewhere East of Suez.

Paying the Dane-geld.

There are various others, including some that have outlived their context by many years. The phrase ‘killing Kruger with your mouth’, for instance, was current till very recently. It is also possible that it was Kipling who first let loose the use of the word ‘Huns’ for Germans; at any rate he began using it as soon as the guns opened fire in 1914. But what the phrases I have listed above have in common is that they are all of them phrases which one utters semi-derisively (as it might be ‘For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May’), but which one is bound to make use of sooner or later. Nothing could exceed the contempt of the New Statesman, for instance, for Kipling, but how many times during the Munich period did the New Statesman find itself quoting that phrase about paying the Dane-geld? The fact is that Kipling, apart from his snack-bar wisdom and his gift for packing much cheap picturesqueness into a few words (’palm and pine’ — ‘east of Suez’ — ‘the road to Mandalay’), is generally talking about things that are of urgent interest. It does not matter, from this point of view, that thinking and decent people generally find themselves on the other side of the fence from him. ‘White man’s burden’ instantly conjures up a real problem, even if one feels that it ought to be altered to ‘black man’s burden’. One may disagree to the middle of one’s bones with the political attitude implied in ‘The Islanders’, but one cannot say that it is a frivolous attitude. Kipling deals in thoughts which are both vulgar and permanent. This raises the question of his special status as a poet, or verse-writer.

Mr. Eliot describes Kipling’s metrical work as ‘verse’ and not ‘poetry’, but adds that it is ‘great verse’, and further qualifies this by saying that a writer can only be described as a ‘great verse-writer’ if there is some of his work ‘of which we cannot say whether it is verse or poetry’. Apparently Kipling was a versifier who occasionally wrote poems, in which case it was a pity that Mr. Eliot did not specify these poems by name. The trouble is that whenever an aesthetic judgement on Kipling’s work seems to be called for, Mr. Eliot is too much on the defensive to be able to speak plainly. What he does not say, and what I think one ought to start by saying in any discussion of Kipling, is that most of Kipling’s verse is so horribly vulgar that it gives one the same sensation as one gets from watching a third-rate music-hall performer recite ‘The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu’ with the purple limelight on his face, and yet there is much of it that is capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means. At his worst, and also his most vital, in poems like ‘Gunga Din’ or ‘Danny Deever’, Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life. But even with his best passages one has the same sense of being seduced by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced. Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could get any pleasure out of such lines as:

For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say,

‘Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!’

And yet those lines are not poetry in the same sense as ‘Felix Randal’ or ‘When icicles hang by the wall’ are poetry. One can, perhaps, place Kipling more satisfactorily than by juggling with the words ‘verse’ and ‘poetry’, if one describes him simply as a good bad poet. He is as a poet what Harriet Beecher Stowe was as a novelist. And the mere existence of work of this kind, which is perceived by generation after generation to be vulgar and yet goes on being read, tells one something about the age we live in.

There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English, all of it, I should say, subsequent to 1790. Examples of good bad poems — I am deliberately choosing diverse ones — are ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, ‘When all the world is young, lad’, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, Bret Harte’s ‘Dickens in Camp’, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’, ‘Jenny Kissed Me’, ‘Keith of Ravelston’, ‘Casabianca’. All of these reek of sentimentality, and yet — not these particular poems, perhaps, but poems of this kind, are capable of giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them. One could fill a fair-sized anthology with good bad poems, if it were not for the significant fact that good bad poetry is usually too well known to be worth reprinting.

It is no use pretending that in an age like our own, ‘good’ poetry can have any genuine popularity. It is, and must be, the cult of a very few people, the least tolerated of the arts. Perhaps that statement needs a certain amount of qualification. True poetry can sometimes be acceptable to the mass of the people when it disguises itself as something else. One can see an example of this in the folk-poetry that England still possesses, certain nursery rhymes and mnemonic rhymes, for instance, and the songs that soldiers make up, including the words that go to some of the bugle-calls. But in general ours is a civilization in which the very word ‘poetry’ evokes a hostile snigger or, at best, the sort of frozen disgust that most people feel when they hear the word ‘God’. If you are good at playing the concertina you could probably go into the nearest public bar and get yourself an appreciative audience within five minutes. But what would be the attitude of that same audience if you suggested reading them Shakespeare’s sonnets, for instance? Good bad poetry, however, can get across to the most unpromising audiences if the right atmosphere has been worked up beforehand. Some months back Churchill produced a great effect by quoting Clough’s ‘Endeavour’ in one of his broadcast speeches. I listened to this speech among people who could certainly not be accused of caring for poetry, and I am convinced that the lapse into verse impressed them and did not embarrass them. But not even Churchill could have got away with it if he had quoted anything much better than this.

In so far as a writer of verse can be popular, Kipling has been and probably still is popular. In his own lifetime some of his poems travelled far beyond the bounds of the reading public, beyond the world of school prize-days, Boy Scout singsongs, limp-leather editions, pokerwork and calendars, and out into the yet vaster world of the music halls. Nevertheless, Mr. Eliot thinks it worthwhile to edit him, thus confessing to a taste which others share but are not always honest enough to mention. The fact that such a thing as good bad poetry can exist is a sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary man. The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. But what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem? A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form — for verse is a mnemonic device, among other things — some emotion which very nearly every human being can share. The merit of a poem like ‘When all the world is young, lad’ is that, however sentimental it may be, its sentiment is ‘true’ sentiment in the sense that you are bound to find yourself thinking the thought it expresses sooner or later; and then, if you happen to know the poem, it will come back into your mind and seem better than it did before. Such poems are a kind of rhyming proverb, and it is a fact that definitely popular poetry is usually gnomic or sententious. One example from Kipling will do:

White hands cling to the bridle rein,

Slipping the spur from the booted heel;

Tenderest voices cry ‘Turn again!’

Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel:

Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,

He travels the fastest who travels alone.^[16]

There is a vulgar thought vigorously expressed. It may not be true, but at any rate it is a thought that everyone thinks. Sooner or later you will have occasion to feel that he travels the fastest who travels alone, and there the thought is, ready-made and, as it were, waiting for you. So the chances are that, having once heard this line, you will remember it.

One reason for Kipling’s power as a good bad poet I have already suggested — his sense of responsibility, which made it possible for him to have a world-view, even though it happened to be a false one. Although he had no direct connexion with any political party, Kipling was a Conservative, a thing that does not exist nowadays. Those who now call themselves Conservatives are either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists. He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who starts out with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by events, for Utopia never arrives and ‘the gods of the copybook headings’, as Kipling himself put it, always return. Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like. It is a great thing in his favour that he is not witty, not ‘daring’, has no wish to épater les bourgeois. He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks. Even his worst follies seem less shallow and less irritating than the ‘enlightened’ utterances of the same period, such as Wilde’s epigrams or the collection of cracker-mottoes at the end of Man and Superman.

1942“Mandalay” – the poem

by Rudyard Kipling

1. By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea,
There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say;
“Come you back, you British Soldier; come you back to Mandalay!”
Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay;
Can’t you ‘ear their paddles clunkin’ from Rangoon to Mandalay?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!

2. ‘Er petticoat was yaller an’ ‘er little cap was green,
An’ ‘er name was Supi-Yaw-Lat jes’ the same as Theebaw’s Queen,
An’ I seed her first a-smokin’ of a whackin’ white cheroot,
An’ wastin’ Christian kisses on an ‘eathen idol’s foot:
Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud–
Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd–
Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed ‘er where she stud!
On the road to Mandalay …

3. When the mist was on the rice-fields an’ the sun was droppin’ slow,
She’d git ‘er little banjo an’ she’d sing “Kulla-la-lo!”
With ‘er arm upon my shoulder an’ ‘er cheek again my cheek
We useter watch the steamers an’ the hathis pilin’ teak.
Elephants a-piling teak
In the sludgy, squdgy creek,
Where the silence ‘ung that ‘eavy you was ‘arf afraid to speak!
On the road to Mandalay …

4. But that’s all shove be’ind me — long ago and fur away,
An’ there ain’t no ‘buses runnin’ from the Bank to Mandalay;
An’ I’m learnin’ ‘ere in London what the ten-year soldier tells:
“If you’ve ‘eard the East a-callin’, you won’t never ‘eed naught else.”
No! you won’t ‘eed nothin’ else
But them spicy garlic smells,
An’ the sunshine an’ the palm-trees an’ the tinkly temple-bells;
On the road to Mandalay …

5. I am sick ‘o wastin’ leather on these gritty pavin’-stones,
An’ the blasted English drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho’ I walks with fifty ‘ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An’ they talks a lot o’ lovin’, but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an’ grubby ‘and–
Law! wot do they understand?
I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

6. Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there ain’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin’, and it’s there that I would be–
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
O the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!

The poem with study notes (in the footnotes)

Kipling's Soldiers (6 cards Mandalay^[17]^[18]

By the old Moulmein^[19] Pagoda^[20], lookin’ lazy at the sea,
There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks o’ me^[21];
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say;
“Come you back, you British Soldier^[22]; come you back to Mandalay!”
Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay;
Can’t you ‘ear their paddles clunkin’ from Rangoon to Mandalay?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!

‘Er petticoat was yaller ^[23]an’ ‘er little cap was green,
An’ ‘er name was Supi-Yaw-Lat^[24] jes’ the same as Theebaw’s Queen^[25],
An’ I seed her first a-smokin’ of a whackin’ white cheroot^[26],
An’ wastin’ Christian kisses on an ‘eathen idol’s foot:
Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud—

Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd^[27]—
Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed ‘er where she stud!
On the road to Mandalay …

When the mist was on the rice-fields an’ the sun was droppin’ slow,
She’d git ‘er little banjo an’ she’d sing “Kulla-la-lo!”
With ‘er arm upon my shoulder an’ ‘er cheek again my cheek^[28]
We useter watch the steamers an’ the hathis^[29] pilin’ teak.
Elephants a-piling teak^[30]
In the sludgy, squdgy creek,
Where the silence ‘ung that ‘eavy you was ‘arf afraid to speak!
On the road to Mandalay …

But that’s all shove be’i nd me — long ago and fur away,
An’ there ain’t no ‘buses runnin’ from the Bank^[31] to Mandalay;
An’ I’m learnin’ ‘ere in London what the ten-year soldier tells:
“If you’ve ‘eard the East a-callin’, you won’t never ‘eed naught else.”
No! you won’t ‘eed nothin’ else
But them spicy garlic smells,
An’ the sunshine an’ the palm-trees an’ the tinkly temple-bells;
On the road to Mandalay …

I am sick ‘o wastin’ leather on these gritty pavin’-stones,
An’ the blasted English drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho’ I walks with fifty ‘ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An’ they talks a lot o’ lovin’, but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an’ grubby ‘and–
Law! wot do they understand?
I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

Ship me somewheres east of Suez^[32], where the best is like the worst,
Where there ain’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin’, and it’s there that I would be–
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick^[33] beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
O the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!

History of the poem

Introduction

“Mandalay” is one of Kipling’s “Barrack-Room Ballads”. The follow excerpt, from Andrew Lycett, provides background information about Kipling’s life, and his writing of the “Barrack-Room Ballads”, amongst other things. ^[34]

Excerpt from Lycett’s book, “Barrack-Room Ballads | Rudyard Kipling.”

From the Peloponnesian War to the Gulf War, music and songs have been essential features of a soldier’s world. Bugle calls, regimental marches, hymns, bawdy limericks and plaintive laments: whether in the heat of battle or the hierarchical world of the barracks, these provide simple, direct means of communication to maintain discipline, boost morale or simply let off steam — in fact, to cope with all the stresses and strains of army life.

The British writer Rudyard Kipling recognized the powerful effect of song and incorporated its emotion, rhythm and sense of camaraderie into his Barrack-Room Ballads, the series of poems he wrote in the 1890s about the experience of military service in India and other parts of the British Empire.

Kipling was a complicated, brilliant man who wrote many things well — not just poems, but stories, novels and journalism. Not for nothing was he awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. He was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in December 1865, the son of a teacher at the local art college and a spirited Irish-Scottish woman who was related to the well-known Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones.

At the age of five, Kipling was sent back to England to live with foster parents (an experience he loathed) and later to attend the United Services College, a school for officers who fought in often forgotten campaigns in all corners of the Empire.

Since young Kipling’s aptitude was for literature rather than for battle, he returned to India at the age of sixteen and joined the staff of the daily newspaper, the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, the Punjab town where his parents had moved, after his father, Lockwood, was appointed keeper of the local museum.

Kipling slowly readjusted to living in colonial India. Initially he stuck to journalism, demonstrating his sharp eye for color and detail in his reports on corruption in municipal politics in Lahore or the decadence of princely courts. As he traveled more widely, he began to satirize the manipulativeness, self-interest and crass stupidity of his fellow “Anglo-Indians” in a series of poems he called Departmental Ditties and in his stories known as Plain Tales from the Hills.

At the same time, he grew to understand the nature of Empire. Despite his general cynicism, he came genuinely to admire the self-sacrifice of doctors, engineers and other administrators who devoted their lives to bringing sanitation, roads and other benefits of Western civilization to remote areas of India. He convinced himself this was a noble cause. As was clear throughout his life, the doers of Empire became his heroes.

Another body was also essential to getting things done in imperial India: the military. Five miles east of Lahore stood the Mian Mir military cantonment, where an infantry battalion and artillery battery were always stationed. Kipling frequently rode over to Mian Mir, where he made it his business to meet not only the officers in their messes but also the enlisted men in their dusty quarters.

Greatly admiring the humor and fortitude of the ordinary soldier in often appalling conditions, he embarked on a series of stories about their life in India. These tales, as collected in Soldiers Three, featured a trio of enlisted men: the Irishman Terence Mulvaney, the Cockney Stanley Ortheris and the Yorkshire-born Jock Learoyd. No one had previously given fictional voice in this way to lowly privates such as Mulvaney, who in “With the Main Guard” asks, “Mary, Mother av Mercy, fwat the divil possist us to take an’ kape this melancholious counthry? Answer me that, sorr.”

Kipling’s stories appeared in six volumes of the Indian Railway Library, published by A. H. Wheeler & Co. with covers drawn by his father. Today the dialect of these soldier tales is sometimes difficult to understand. But in the late 1880s, they proved sensational. English literature was experiencing a creative lull after the vibrancy of Dickens and Thackeray. Kipling’s stories provided color and energy, while introducing British readers to a hitherto unknown aspect of the expanding Empire.

One of the six volumes, Soldiers Three, was reviewed in the Spectator in London in March 1889 — unusual for a book published in India. It was also well received by Sidney Low, editor of the conservative daily newspaper the St. James’s Gazette, who pronounced enthusiastically about a new talent “who had dawned upon the eastern horizon. . . . It may be that a greater than Dickens is here.” The generally positive response encouraged Kipling to give up his newspaper job and move to London to try his hand in a much more sophisticated and potentially lucrative market.

Arriving in the British capital in October 1889, Kipling immediately worried that he had made the wrong decision. Out of place among the fashionable aesthetes of the time, he wrote his well-observed poem “In Partibus,” which for some reason he declined to include in his Collected Verse. This chronicled his longing for the sunshine and moral certainties of India, where the Indian army man was

Set up, and trimmed and taut,
Who does not spout hashed libraries
Or think the next man’s thought,
And walks as though he owned himself,
And hogs his bristles short.

After a period of debilitating homesickness, Kipling found his professional feet, especially after meeting W. E. Henley, editor of the influential Conservative journal the Scots Observer. Henley, with his wooden leg, was the model for Long John Silver in his friend Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, published in 1883. He had been alerted to Kipling’s talents by a seafaring brother who had read one of the young man’s poems in an Indian newspaper. He invited Kipling to his club, the Savile, after which his guest pronounced Henley “more different varieties of man than most” — a typically wry compliment.

Kipling agreed to work on a freelance basis for the Scots Observer. This was not too painful: on the surface, it was one of the periodicals most sympathetic to his views. Run by a group of old-fashioned Tories in Edinburgh, it was a forceful proponent of British imperialism.

His first submission was a trifle — a wry Jacobean-style meditation on love and death. However, his second piece was “Danny Deever,” a simple, graphic, rhythmic, insistent ballad about a soldier hanged by his regiment for shooting a colleague. When he read it, Henley is said to have danced on his wooden leg. Published in the Scots Observer on 22 February 1890, it was immediately seized on by David Masson, the opinion-making professor of rhetoric and English literature at Edinburgh University, who exclaimed enthusiastically to his students, “Here’s literature! Here’s literature at last!”

Kipling responded by offering Henley twelve more poems about the travails of military life, which the Scots Observer published over the next few months. Kipling had conceived this kind of verse while in India: in late 1888 he had offered a Calcutta publisher a volume composed of “my Barrack-Room Ballads and other Poems which includes 2 soldiers songs and a variety of Anglo-Indian sentimental and descriptive work,” and on his journey home eastward across the Pacific Ocean and the American continent, he had hummed what he called his “Tommy Atkins ballads” to Edmonia Hill, a well-read American woman whom he had befriended in Allahabad.

However the Barrack-Room Ballads took real poetic form only in the particular circumstances of his life in London. As soon as he arrived, he rented a set of rooms in Villiers Street, running beside Charing Cross Station in the center of town. At the end of his street stood Gatti’s, a popular music hall. Often he would go there after a day’s work, four pence buying admission and a pewter jar of beer. At Gatti’s he got to know something missing in India — the vibrancy of working-class culture. Inspired by the “compelling songs” of the Lion and Mammoth Comiques, he wrote to Edmonia (known as Ted) Hill, saying that London needed “a poet of the Music Halls.” For his old paper, the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, he wrote a story, “My Great and Only,” about a venue such as Gatti’s, where, to the uninhibited accompaniment of his audience, a star belts out a ditty about a Life Guard’s inexpert wooing of an undercook. Kipling composed the song himself, complete with the refrain

And that’s what the Girl told the Soldier,
Soldier! Soldier!
An’ that’s what the Girl told the Soldier.

Such entertainments suggested to Kipling that he could bring together the immediacy of the music hall with his firsthand observations of military life (mainly gained in India). This did not mean he wanted to write music hall songs; rather, he intended to draw on popular culture for his soldier poems. And that required him to incorporate elements from the ballads, marches and laments that soldiers had written and sung through the ages, giving them a modern twist.

A ballad essentially tells a story graphically and in verse. It is rhythmic and memorable because it is hewn in the oral tradition. Over the years poets from Wordsworth to Longfellow had appropriated the form, either as a narrative device or as a means of suggesting simplicity. Kipling himself had written some traditional “literary” ballads, such as his romantic evocation of Pathan nobility in the “Ballad of East and West.”

Now he turned the form to describing the experiences of his soldier friends and heroes — from their proud familiarity with their guns (“Screw-Guns”), through the cussedness of camels in the baggage trains (“Oonts”), to the pleasures of service life abroad (“Mandalay”).

From February to July 1890, thirteen Barrack-Room Ballads were published in Scots Observer. In chronological order these were: “Danny Deever,” “Tommy,” “Fuzzy-Wuzzy,” “Oonts,” “Loot,” “Soldier, Soldier,” “The Sons of the Widow” (which Kipling later renamed “The Widow at Windsor”), “Troopin’,” “Gunga Din,” “Mandalay,” “The Young British Soldier,” “Screw-Guns” and “Belts.”

Because Kipling’s best friend in London was the American publisher Wolcott Balestier, these ballads were first published in book form not in London but in New York, where the United States Book Company brought out an edition of Departmental Ditties, Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses in December 1890 — an introductory omnibus for the American market, incorporating some of the witty poems Kipling had written in India, as well as his more recent ballads.

Over the next year or so Kipling continued to write Barrack-Room Ballads, but not in the intense manner of those early months of 1890. He was also writing stories, different types of verse, and even a couple of novels (one, The Naulahka, with Balestier). However, in December 1891, Balestier died of typhoid fever in Germany, causing Kipling great grief. To the astonishment of mutual friends, including Henry James, Kipling abruptly married Balestier’s sister Carrie and moved across the Atlantic to her home town of Brattleboro in Vermont.

By then he had composed a further seven soldiers’ songs, which appeared with the original thirteen and many others in Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses, published by Methuen in London and Macmillan in New York in March 1892 (the month after his marriage to Carrie). This edition also contained an emotional dedication to Wolcott Balestier.

While writing other works, such as The Jungle Books, in his self-built house in Brattleboro, Kipling continued to produce occasional Barrack-Room Ballads. He sent them to magazines, such as the Pall Mall Gazette in London, and later included them all (by now an additional seventeen) in a special section at the end of his next book of poems, The Seven Seas, published by D. Appleton and Company in a limited copyright edition in New York in September 1896 and by Methuen in London two months later.

This later group of seventeen poems does not have the force of his original Barrack-Room Ballads. To an extent, they reflect the nostalgia of an Englishman living in Vermont for the imperial, military life. One or two have nothing to do with the army at all–“Bill ‘Awkins” is more of a music hall ditty, while “The Mother-Lodge” comes in the category of “fond recollection.” However they do include certain poems that can rank with his earlier soldiers’ songs. “The Ladies” is a sophisticated take on the joys of eclectic sexual experience, “The Sergeant’s Weddin” ‘offers a typically cheeky insight into the behavior of noncommissioned officers, “The Shut-Eye Sentry” is another amusing behind-the-scenes look at regimental life, while “Mary, Pity Women!” brings together the music hall, emotional longing and religion.

Looked at in their entirety, the thirty-seven Barrack-Room Ballads provide a journalistic overview of British army life in the late nineteenth century. Sometimes specific poems, such as “The Men That Fought at Minden” or “Snarleyow,” look back to earlier campaigns, but that is in the nature of ballads — a poetic form that tends to emphasize the continuity of experience, with the same themes continually arising in these tales of barrack-room existence, action in the field and the pain of being away from one’s loved ones.

Kipling ranges over different categories of military service, writing about the engineers (“Sapper”), gunners (“Screw-Guns”) and marines (“Soldier an’ Sailor Too”). He has something to say about most stages of a soldier’s life from recruitment (“The Young British Soldier”) through instruction (“The Men That Fought at Minden”) to going home (“Troopin” ‘) and later reflecting on their military experience (“Mandalay”), and even trying to sign up again (“Back to the Army Again”). He is good on local color, as in “Gentleman-Rankers,” but does not gloss over horrors (“Cholera Camp”) or even politically incorrect practices (“Loot”). While focusing on the camaraderie of soldiers (“Gunga Din”), their antics in the barracks (“The Shut-Eye Sentry”), their drunkenness (“Cells”), their brawling (“Belts”) and their experience in battle (“Snarleyow”), he does not ignore the woman’s role in a soldier’s life — usually as the person left behind (“Mary, Pity Women!”), sometimes a snatched but generally much valued love on the road (“The Ladies”).

While the effect is sympathetic to the army’s involvement in British imperialism, Kipling is not afraid to point out the negative reactions of the rank and file: sometimes they fail to understand what they are fighting for (“The Widow’s Party”) or they resent the condescension and hypocrisy of civilians who seem to love them when they are going off to fight but otherwise scorn or ignore them (“Tommy”).

For the “background accompaniment” to his poetry, Kipling drew on all types of music familiar to the army man, from hymns (“The ‘Eathen”) through the bugle in “The Widow’s Party” and the drum beats in “Danny Deever” or “Route Marchin” ‘ to the ritual funeral march of “Follow Me ‘Ome.”

For the poetic heart of his output, Kipling looked to popular ballads (Scottish border ballads, in particular), though he gave them his own contemporary gloss. On one level, he did this through his use of colloquialisms and dialect, incorporating Cockney, Irish, military and a sprinkling of Hindustani phrases. This was often shocking to critics brought up in the literary tradition of Tennyson (whose “Charge of the Light Brigade” was an earlier foray into army subject matter). On the other, he was skillful in his adaptation of ballad meters — a point recognized by T. S. Eliot, who wrote enthusiastically about the “combination of heavy beat and variation of pace” in “Danny Deever,” “a poem which is technically (as well as in content) remarkable. The regular recurrence of the same end-words, which gain immensely by imperfect rhyme (parade and said) gives the feeling of marching feet and the movement of men in disciplined formation — in a unity of movement which enhances the horror of the occasion and the sickness which seizes the men as individuals; and the slightly quickened pace of the final lines marks the changes in movement and in music.” (A Choice of Kipling’s Verse)

Eliot noted the appositeness of the word “whimpers” at that poem’s end:

“What’s that that whimpers over’ead?” said Files-on-Parade.
“It’s Danny’s soul that’s passin’ now,” the Colour-Sergeant said.

Eliot may well have recalled this in his famous line in “The Hollow Men”:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper.

If nothing else, Eliot’s comments show that Kipling’s achievement in Barrack-Room Ballads was respected by his peers. Kipling’s poetic snapshots of war were very different from the more lugubrious reflections that were to be sent home by participants in the First World War. Although his soldiers had their complaints, they tended to look back with some satisfaction on their military careers, even if the bottom line was the imperialist project conveyed in “The Widow’s Party”:

We broke a King and we built a road–
A court-house stands where the reg’ment goed.
And the river’s clean where the raw blood
flowed. . . .

Metre, rhythm and musical aspect

Preliminary note

The source of the following paragraph is unclear.

Ballad

The poem may be said to be a type of broadsheet ballad. A ballad^[35] is a story in song, usually a narrative song or poem. It is a rhythmic saga of a past affair, which may be heroic, romantic or satirical, almost inevitably catastrophic, which is related in the third person, usually with foreshortened alternating four- and three-stress lines (‘ballad meter’) and simple repeating rhymes, and often with a refrain. The poem consists of 6 verses (the first and last verses having 10 lines, the others 8) with the following rhyme scheme (first two verses): aabbbbbbbbbb ccddeeeb. The rhymes established in the first verse are repeated in the manner of a ballad with the use of a refrain: “On the road to Mandalay”. The refrain and repetition of rhyme creates might be said to be circular and creates a romantic permanent longing.

Musical aspects of Kipling’s poetry

The following is an extract from “Kipling and Music” by Brian Mattinson^[36]

Kipling’s complex cultural background exposed him to the rhythms of Bombay, Lahore and Simla, the vigour of African drums, old sea-songs, hymns, music-hall songs, border ballads, and the folk-songs of England and the American dust-bowl. So we should not be surprised that he often had a tune in mind when writing his verse. Kay Robinson wrote ‘When I knew Kipling in India . . . many of the ‘Departmental Ditties’, for instance, were written not only to music but as music. . . Kipling always conceived his verses in that way – as a tune, often a remarkably musical and, to me, novel tune’.

Some suggested templates are documented :-

“Boots” ‘John Brown’s Body’
“Coiner, The” tunes suggested by Kipling ‘King John and the Abbot of Canterbury’ (unlearned), ‘Tempest-a-brewing’ (learned)
“Danny Deever” bawdy army song ‘Barnacle (‘Bollocky’) Bill the Sailor’
“Farewell Greenwich Ladies” based on words and metre of ‘Spanish Ladies’, a Somerset sea shanty quoted in The Light that Failed.
“Follow Me ‘Ome'” part fits ‘Dead March’ from Saul by G F Handel
“Ford o’Kabul River” refrain echoes ‘Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching’
“Fox-Hunting” ‘The Vicar of Bray’
“Holy War, The” hymn tune ‘Aurelia’ (‘The Church’s one foundation’)
“If-“ ‘Galway Bay’ . Hymn tune ‘Strength and Stay’
“Lukannon” long-shore bawd ‘I met Moll Roe in the morning’
“Mandalay” a popular waltz

Background – Myanmar

Preliminary note

The source(s) for “Background” also seems to be lost. But any search for a word-string in the following will provide several hits on the Internet. But the reader will quickly discover that the following text is ‘out of date’, as Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest and was State Counsellor and Foreign Minister (2016–2021), but later arrested again on 1 February 2021, and deposed by the Myanmar military.

myanmar The Union of Myanmar, also known as Burma, is a country in Southeast Asia. The country has been ruled by a military government since a coup in 1988. The country is a developing nation. It has a population of approximately forty-two million (July 2003 est.).

On becoming independent in 1948 the country became known as the “Union of Burma” but in 1989 the ruling military government renamed the state to the “Union of Myanmar”. This change of name has been rejected by opponents of the current government, both within and outside of the country, who argue that the government did not have authority to institute it. The title of the Union of Myanmar is recognized by the United Nations, but rejected by some national governments, including the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. Myanmar is a derivative of the Burmese short-form name Myanma Naingngandaw.

Previously an independent kingdom, in 1886 Burma was annexed by the British Empire to the colony of India. The Japanese Empire invaded and occupied the country during World War II but it was returned to British control.

Aung San Suu Kyi In 1948 the nation became sovereign, as the Union of Burma, with U Nu as the first Prime Minister. Democratic rule ended in 1962 with a military coup led by General Ne Win. Ne Win ruled for nearly 26 years, bringing in harsh reforms. In 1990 free elections were held, but were voided by the military, which refused to step down.

Myanmar has been under military rule since 1988. The current head of state is General Than Shwe who holds the title of “Chairman of the State Peace and Development Council.” His appointed prime minister was Khin Nyunt until 19 October 2004, when he was replaced by Lt.-Gen. Soe Win. Almost all cabinet offices are held by military officers. US sanctions against the military government have been largely ineffective, due to loopholes in the sanctions and the willingness of mainly Asian business to continue investing in Myanmar and to initiate new investments, particularly in natural resource extraction. For example, the French petroleum company Total is able to buy Myanmar’s oil despite the country being under sanctions, although Total (formerly Total-Elf-Fina) is the subject of a lawsuit in French and Belgian courts for alleged connections to human rights abuses along the gas pipeline jointly owned by Total, the American company Unocal, and the Myanmarian military. The United States clothing and shoe industry could also be affected if all the sanctions loopholes were to be closed, although they were already subject to boycotts prior to US sanctions imposed in June of 2002.

The regime is accused of having a poor human rights record, and the human rights situation in the country is a subject of concern for a wide number of international organizations. There is no independent judiciary in Myanmar and political opposition to the military government is not tolerated.

Aung San Suu Kyi, whose party won 83% of parliamentary seats in a 1990 national election, but who was prevented from becoming prime minister by the military, has earned international praise as an activist for the return of democratic rule to Myanmar. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. She has been repeatedly placed under house arrest, although in recent years the regime has been willing to enter into negotiations with her and her party, the National League for Democracy. She was most recently placed under house arrest on May 31, 2003, following an attack on her convoy in northern Myanmar. She remains under house arrest.

The Suez Canal^[37]

The Suez Canal was built again between 25 April 1859 and 1869 by the Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez (Universal Suez Ship Canal Company) led by Ferdinand de Lesseps while the plan for the project was created by Alois Negrelli, an Austrian engineer, the canal was owned by the Egyptian government and France. The first ship to pass through the canal did so on 17 February 1867 and it was inaugurated in an elaborate ceremony on 17 November 1869 (the proceedings had begun the day before); Giuseppe Verdi wrote the famous opera Aida for this ceremony. It is estimated that 1.5 million Egyptians worked on the canal and that 125,000 died, many due to cholera.

The canal had an immediate and dramatic effect on world trade. It played an important role in increasing European penetration of Africa. External debts forced Isma’il Pasha to sell his country’s share in the canal to the United Kingdom, and British troops moved in to protect it in 1882, controlling the country until 1952. The canal also allowed Europeans far easier access to East Africa and this area was soon carved up by European powers.

The success of the canal encouraged the French to embark on building the Panama Canal, a task that they were unable to complete, however.

On 26 July 1956, the newly established republican government of Egypt under president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the canal, which caused Britain, France and Israel to invade in the week-long Suez War, also known as the Tripartite Invasion. As a result of the war, the canal was closed for several months. The United Nations declared the canal Egyptian property.

After the Six Day War in 1967, the canal remained closed until June 5, 1975. A UN peacekeeping force has been stationed in the Sinai Peninsula since 1974.

Old Moulmein Pagoda

RUDYARD KIPLING description

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay on December 30th 1865, son of John Lockwood Kipling, an artist and teacher of architectural sculpture, and his wife Alice. His mother was one of the talented and beautiful Macdonald sisters, four of whom married remarkable men, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Sir Edward Poynter, Alfred Baldwin, and John Lockwood Kipling himself. ^[38]

Kipling wrote “If” with Dr Leander Starr Jameson in mind. In 1895, Jameson led about 500 of his countrymen in a failed raid against the Boers, in southern Africa. What became known as the Jameson Raid was later cited as a major factor in bringing about the Boer War of 1899 to 1902. But the story as recounted in Britain was quite different. The British defeat was interpreted as a victory and Jameson portrayed as a daring hero.^[39]

Kipling gained renown throughout the world as a poet and storyteller. He was also known as a leading supporter of the British Empire. As apparent from his stories and poems, Kipling interested himself in the romance and adventure which he found in Great Britain’s colonial expansion.

Rudyard Kipling’s (1865-1936) inspirational poem ‘If’ first appeared in his collection ‘Rewards and Fairies’ in 1909. The poem ‘If’ is inspirational, motivational, and a set of rules for ‘grown-up’ living. Kipling’s ‘If’ contains mottos and maxims for life, and the poem is also a blueprint for personal integrity, behaviour and self-development. ‘If’ is perhaps even more relevant today than when Kipling wrote it, as an ethos and a personal philosophy. Lines from Kipling’s ‘If’ appear over the player’s entrance to Wimbledon’s Centre Court – a poignant reflection of the poem’s timeless and inspiring quality.

The beauty and elegance of ‘If’ contrasts starkly with Rudyard Kipling’s largely tragic and unhappy life. He was starved of love and attention and sent away by his parents; beaten and abused by his foster mother; and a failure at a public school which sought to develop qualities that were completely alien to Kipling. In later life the deaths of two of his children also affected Kipling deeply.

Rudyard Kipling achieved fame quickly, based initially on his first stories and poems written in India (he returned there after College), and his great popularity with the British public continued despite subsequent critical reaction to some of his more conservative work, and critical opinion in later years that his poetry was superficial and lacking in depth of meaning.

Significantly, Kipling turned down many honours offered to him including a knighthood, Poet Laureate and the Order of Merit, but in 1907 he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. Kipling’s wide popular appeal survives through other works, notably The Jungle Book (1894) the novel, Kim (1901), and Just So Stories (1902).^[40]

As Kipling grew as a poet he branched out into different forms of poetry becoming one of the best ballad writers of all time. “Mandalay” and “The Ballad of the East and West”, two of his best ballads, can justify this claim without leaving any room for doubt. “Mandalay”, one of Kipling’s most effective and haunting ballad expresses his sensuous response to life in the East. The soldier in this poem hates the cold weather of England and wants his superiors to send him “somewhere east of Suez”. He wishes that someone might call him to the east and he might get a chance to go back to the “spicy garlic [odour]” and the “tinkly temple-bells.” Through the use of such imagery he creates a beautiful atmosphere prevalent in the east, arises a sense of love for the eastern nations and generates a longing for living there.^[41] Through this poem he not only makes the worldview India, but touches it and even breathes it. By repeating the phrase “on the road to Mandalay” throughout the poem he creates a haunting impression in the mind of the reader of this town somewhere in India. Reading this ballad in its languorous, slow-moving refrain creates a melody of its own. While “Mandalay” showcases the countries of the east, “The Ballad of the East and West” depicts the differences present between the east and west even though uniformity in human nature subsists around the world.^[42]

Brief comment on Orwell’s essay about Kipling

I feel a bit hesitant about making any comment. Orwell lived (1903-1950) in the historical period following Kipling (1865-1936). In other words, he was in contact with the mindset of the time. I was born one year before the death of Orwell, and some 15 years after the death of Kipling, so I have to admit that Orwell’s detailed descriptions of the historical period seem somewhat distant to me.

Nevertheless, some things make sense to me – and that is Orwell’s criticism of Kipling’s patronizing use of Cockney dialect. Thus, in the poem “Mandalay”, Kipling not only disrespects the prostitutes that ‘served’ British soldiers, but he also makes the private soldiers (who were the foundation of the Empire) into laughing stocks, because of the way they spoke.

IF^[43] by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!

“Mandalay and Me” by Ray Rasmussen^[44]

One of my earliest memories is of a hand–a large, warm, secure hand way up there in the air above my shoulders. I’m pretty sure that it was my mom’s hand leading me to my first day of kindergarten. My next memory is one of looking out a window through a shroud of tears at the her retreating form.

After a few weeks, I adjusted. After all, my teacher was a glorious blonde–my first love. She might not have really been beautiful, but to this day I remember her with whatever passes for lust at age 6. It is perhaps because of her that I more readily accepted the first responsibilities of my life which consisted of lining up, paying attention, sitting still, not fighting in the schoolyard and not crying. If I broke any of the first four rules, I had to lay down on a large sheet of paper in the cloak room–punishment by isolation. If I broke the fifth rule–I was punished mercilessly by my schoolmates who might have been the models for the children in Golding’s “Lord of the Flies.”

Between that time and now, sometime in the last 50 years, I made a transition from being an irresponsible boy who was given everything–board, bed, clothing, presents, hugs–to being a Dad to two daughters, who along with his wife is responsible for everything–food, shelter, clothing, transportation, emotional support, health problems, security and on and on it goes.

Despite all the talk about men being irresponsible, I am now fully wearing the mantle of responsibility–well, okay, maybe not fully. And, I don’t complain about the burden … I just do these things as a regular part of life.

Despite my steady development in the arena of responsibility, I have always lagged the expectations of the women in my life by a considerable margin. Maggie, my first girlfriend, vintage 17-years-old was my next important teacher. At the precise moment when I had finally succeeded in unhooking the complicated mechanisms that held her bra in place and gazed upon her pert, creamy breasts, she asked me whether I loved her. I did what any man would do in such a circumstance and said “sure” and continued eagerly with the business of sampling those strawberry nipples. I soon after left home [and her] for college never to return except in fantasy. It was our first lesson in that particularly troublesome area of responsibility called commitment. Maggie, who was married only a year later, must have learned to secure something more substantial than “sure” in exchange for her delectables. And, I learned to say something more convincing than “sure” when engaging in my struggles with bras of various sizes and shapes.

Like many men, I have had few mentors to guide the transition from feckless youth to responsible man. My father was Bergman’s introverted Dane–so I never learned whatever lessons of life were his to teach. Strangely, I do remember a ride I took with him and a friend of his. At one point in the ride, his friend shouted, “Wow, look at that!” I was about 12 at the time and look as I might, I could find nothing in the landscape worth seeing, no hot rod, no kids, no airplane, no accident … nothing! It was only much later in life when I found sense in that memory. I was sitting with a friend at an outdoor restaurant and he said, “Wow, look at that!” as a particularly shapely woman waltzed by.

One of my few mentors was a man 20-years older to my then 35. We were eating at a restaurant and I noticed him looking closely at a young waitress. I wondered aloud whether the thrill of the look diminished with age. He laughed and told me that it only gets better–that each year a man can find beauty in more and more women–that every woman his age and younger had become a target of his look. As he predicted, my look has expanded dramatically.

It is only my astoundingly high birthday number and an occasional glance in the mirror that reminds me that I am something else than that boy who so recently stood weeping at the kindergarten window. While I’ve assumed the mantle of responsibility in deed, I don’t feel particularly responsible or mature inside. And the issue of commitment has been an ongoing nightmare–as I sense it is for many men and women.

I wandered through this profound transition period of about 50 years not unlike a blind man feeling his way with inadequate sensory instruments. The journey has been primarily one of bumbling along, stumbling from here to there, floundering with this or that philosophy, languishing in overlong periods of intense loneliness, and sometimes falling into lush, sensual pleasures with a woman who for reasons unknown to me wandered into my life.

During the journey, several things stood out … the birth of my daughters, my loves [for my wife’s sake, it would be nice to say “love,” but that wouldn’t be true], some outstanding moments in wilderness, the rush of whitewater from the cockpit of a kayak, the motley gang of irresponsible boy-men with whom I paddled Canada’s wild rivers, several painful betrayals, this victory and that loss in my wilderness work, an occasional break though in the classroom, a glimpse of understanding–small moments all, the stuff of life.

In short, I’ve done far worse than the blind person who seems to ably and smoothly make the transition to the other side of the street without bumping into anything or becoming road kill.

One of the literary works touched me during the long transition years was the haunting rhythms of Kipling’s poem “Mandalay”. Recently I reread the poem and tried to understand its attraction to the me who first read it at age 30.

Stepping into the shoes of that 30-year old lonely man, I can now readily understand the appeal of a girl who has nothing better to do than sit and think o’ me. I know her well still. She’s young, beautiful, lithe, and she exists just to make love with me–as do all those women who look out of the pages of Playboy Magazine with longing in their eyes for just me, their special guy. She’s my 17-year-old girlfriend, Maggie, but without the demand for commitment. And, she lives in paradise. Consider her attributes:

‘Er petticoat was yaller an’ ‘er little cap was green,
An’ ‘er name was Supi-Yaw-Lat, jes’ the same as Theebaw’s Queen,
An’ I seed her first a-smokin’ of a whackin’ white cheroot,
An’ wastin’ Christian kisses on an ‘eathen idol’s foot:
Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud–
Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd–
Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed ‘er where she stud!

What power I have over this lovely creature! She lives in a land full of Burmese men, yet it is me who captures her with my manly kisses. Sure, in my more advanced responsible state, I realize that she’s a prostitute and that like other women in her country she too wants a secure male with whom to raise a family, and that she would within weeks be making subtle demands for whatever level of commitment she thought was within her power to negotiate. She’s not at all unlike Maggie and every woman friend I’ve had since her. Still I want her! For:

When the mist was on the rice-fields an’ the sun was droppin’ slow,
She’d git ‘er little banjo an’ she’d sing “Kulla-la-lo!”
With ‘er arm upon my shoulder an’ ‘er cheek again my cheek
We useter watch the steamers an’ the hathis pilin’ teak.
Elephants a-piling teak
In the sludgy, squdgy creek,
Where the silence ‘ung that ‘eavy you was ‘arf afraid to speak!
On the road to Mandalay …

Okay, I’ll grant you that watching elephants a-pilin’ teak in a sludgy, squdgy creek wouldn’t be fun forever or even more than once, even if your girl is a singin’ ‘Kulla-la-lo’ and restin’ ‘er cheek again’ your cheek. So what is it that still draws me to the poem? Kipling provides further insight with a glimpse into the 10-year English soldier’s–the older man’s–psyche:

An’ I’m learnin’ ‘ere in London what the ten-year soldier tells:
“If you’ve ‘eard the East a-callin’, you won’t never ‘eed naught else.”
No! you won’t ‘eed nothin’ else
But them spicy garlic smells,
An’ the sunshine an’ the palm-trees an’ the tinkly temple-bells;
On the road to Mandalay …
I am sick ‘o wastin’ leather on these gritty pavin’-stones,
An’ the blasted English drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho’ I walks with fifty ‘ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An’ they talks a lot o’ lovin’, but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an’ grubby ‘and–
Law! wot do they understand?
I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay . . .

Like Kipling’s 10-year soldier, my life has been filled with wonderful women who can’t seem to understand the male me, the me who likes war [or at least war movies] and its modern irresponsible substitute–death defying sport, the me who enjoys looking at women and, when it works out, making love with them.

Mandalay is a cleaner, greener land because I’m a tourist there. I’m not responsible for much beyond making love and war. I want to be soldier-tourist languishing on life’s beach … not the responsible, leather wastin’, drizzle walkin’ beast of burden that I’ve become. Thus, Kipling’s wistful conclusion:

Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there ain’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst;

Or, in my case, at least for a few weeks of each year, ship me somewheres east, where I can foolishly rush through whitewater with my buddies, where we can raise hell around the campfire and where we can find of group of Supi-Yaw-Lats for love making on the beach. Ship me to a Mandalay beach where I can drink without fear of that chiding woman with beefy face and grubby ‘and who doesn’t understand me. Ship me far far away from that horror called the family vacation where the bored, fighting, screaming kids have to be catered to every moment of the day. Ship me to a place where I’m not reminded daily that men are irresponsible, unloving, unwilling to commit. Ship me back to that place where my boy-buddies and I were in our primes … when we were immortal. And, don’t tell me that I’m having a mid-life crisis!!!

For the temple-bells are callin’, and it’s there that I would be–
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
O the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!

Someone said that our responsibilities define our lives … that a life without responsibilities is a dead man’s walk. For the rest of the weeks of the year, I’ll accept those responsibilities because I’ve found that to be true … that my responsibilities as a teacher, environmentalist, father, husband, lover, friend are the things that define living–things that prevent life from becoming too much like a “blasted English drizzle.”

As for that more difficult issue of commitment, I now realize that unfortunately there is no “Supi-Yaw-Lat,” that all women are human beings albeit with different needs and sensibilities than men, or at least men like me. People in every type relationship, friends, lovers, spouses and even work partners, face the difficult task of negotiating their levels and types of commitment. The high divorce rate, profound feelings of betrayal, and harsh words used on ex-partners are indications that few of us get it right.

Comment on Ray

I don’t want to be too critical of Ray. In fact, we should thank him because he points out why many men like this poem. But herein lies the catch – why do they like the poem? Because it is no more than a ‘male fantasy’ – an objectification of women.

References

(Various internet sources accessed mainly in 2014, many of which are now offline and thus it is unable to refer to these specifically)

Blake, William. 1808. “Jerusalem”.

Ghosh, Amitav. 2000. The Glass Palace.

Kipling, Rudyard. “Mandalay”. 1890.

Kipling, Rudyard. 1922. “That Day”.

Kipling, Rudyard. 1922. “The ‘Eathen.”

Kipling, Rudyard. 1922. “The Winners”.

Lycett, Andrew. 2003. “Barrack-Room Ballads | Rudyard Kipling.” Signet Classics.

Orwell, George. 1934. Burmese Days.

Orwell, George. 1936. “Rudyard Kipling”.

Rasmussen, Ray. “Mandalay and Me”.

Tennyson, Alfred. 1854. “The Charge of the Light Brigade”.

Footnotes

A Choice of Kipling’s Verse, made by T. S. Eliot (Faber & Faber, 82. 6d.)

1945. Published in a volume of Collected Essays, The Wound and the Bow (Secker & Warburg)

On the first page of his recent book, Adam and Eve, Mr. Middleton Murry quotes the well-known lines:

‘There are nine and sixty ways

Of constructing tribal lays,

And every single one of them is right.’

He attributes these lines to Thackeray. This is probably what is known as a ’Freudian error’. A civilized person would prefer not to quote Kipling — i.e. would prefer not to feel that it was Kipling who had expressed his thought for him.

Roots

“Rudyard Kipling” by George Orwell, first published February 1942 in ‘Horizon’.
Reprinted:
1946: Critical Essays / Dickens, Dali, and Others
1956: The Orwell Reader, Fiction, Essays, and Reportage
1961: Collected Essays
1965: Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays
1968: Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell
ocr-ed and html-ed: O. Dag, MSK (8 April 2003), 4umi.

These notes are not fully referenced. ↑
George Bliar is a pseudonym based or Eric Blair (George Orwell) and Tony Blair (who is a ‘liar’) – regarding his comments about the nuclear potential of Iraq, and ‘weapons of mass destruction’. ↑
“While it’s true that Kipling parodies the smug Christian missionaries in Kim and invests the Lama with some sort of rustic charm and dignity, he can be casually irreverent to non-Christian icons in a way he would never be to Christ.” http://akbar.marlboro.edu/~birje/home.html ↑
The world’s oldest profession has always been attracted to ports, harbours and docklands.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/2371233.stm ↑
https://1library.net/document/yne8wg1y-critical-perspectives-of-amitav-ghosh-the-glass-palace.html Date accessed: 9 Jan. 2023. ↑
“Jerusalem” by William Blake. ↑
Britain had the largest colonial empire in the nineteenth century, and the largest industrial production. It was the first country to industrialise. ↑
This website has gone offline, as of 2023. ↑
The website has gone offline, as of 2023. ↑
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/readers-guide/rg_med_neurol.htm Read: 9 Jan. 2023. ↑
George Orwell: “Rudyard Kipling” (1936). ↑
https://orwell.ru/library/reviews/kipling/english/e_rkip Read: 9 January 2023. ↑
“That Day” by Rudyard Kipling. 1922. ↑
“The ‘Eathen” by Rudyard Kipling. 1922. ↑
Tennyson, Alfred. 1854. “The Charge of the Light Brigade”. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is an 1854 narrative poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson about the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War. ↑
Kipling, Rudyard. 1922. “The Winners”. ↑
These study notes are only draft notes and not fully referenced. ↑
Mandalay is the second largest city (2000 pop. 801,707) and former royal capital of Myanmar (formerly Burma). An administrative region of Myanmar is also named after it. Mandalay was the last capital (1860–1885) of the independent Burmese Kingdom before it was annexed by the British in 1885. Unlike other Burmese towns, Mandalay did not grow from a smaller settlement to town proportions. Mandalay was set up in an empty area at the foot of Mandalay Hill because of a prophecy made by the Buddha that in that exact place a great city, metropolis of Buddhism, would come into existence on occasion of the 2,400th jubilee of Buddhism. Mandalay was captured by the British. Mandalay is a cultural and religious center of Buddhism, having many monasteries and more than 700 pagodas. At the bottom of Mandalay Hill sits the world’s official “Buddhist Bible“, also known as the world’s largest book, in Kuthodaw Pagoda. There are 729 slabs inscribed with the entire Buddhist cannon, each housed in it own white stupa. http://www.answers.com/topic/mandalay ↑
Moulmein (Mawlamyine) is a beautiful city (Burma’s third largest) by the Salween River. It was a bustling seaport under former British and Burmese administrations. In those days, huge ships sailed and docked here, loaded teak logs and rice and transported them to markets all over the world. I was happy to be in Moulmein again, for I had attended the city’s Amherst Elementary School as a child. My school’s namesake, Lord Amherst, was Governor of British-occupied 18th-century Lower Burma, of which Moulmein was the capital. This was also the city that made Nobel laureate Rudyard Kipling famous. His verse “Road to Mandalay” which was set in this city, rather than in Mandalay, brought him fame as a poet and writer. Another great writer George Orwell once stationed here as a police officer. His popular essay “Shooting an Elephant” was about his personal experience in Moulmein. http://www.bapsusa.org/newsletters/newsletter_11_99.html ↑
Pagoda is the general English term for a tower-shaped building, often religious in purpose, common in China and other parts of Asia. Pagodas are usually found in association with Temples (often Buddhist) and are believed to offer protection to the temple. As lightning generally strikes the highest structure in a vicinity, this may have played a role in their perception as spiritually charged places. By attracting the lightning they also protect the Temple. http://pagoda.biography.ms/ ↑
Kipling took up the causes of the rank and file in his journalism. For example, he campaigned for a more realistic approach to sex. The soldiers often used the services of local bazaar prostitutes, but the authorities made little attempt to inspect the girls involved, with the result, Kipling argued, that there were nine thousand “expensive white men a year always laid from venereal disease.” (reference: see ‘introduction’ below). ↑
In the first Burmese war of 1824-26 the troops of the East India Company seized the Province of Assam, bordering on Bengal, and the coastal districts of Arakan and Tenasserim. The second Burmese war (1852) resulted in the seizure by the British of the Province of Pegu. Burma did not sign a peace treaty, however, and refused to recognise the seizure of Pegu. In 1853 the British authorities threatened to resume military operations but abstained from this step, largely due to the guerrilla warfare in Pegu against the foreign invaders, which continued until 1860. In the 1860s Britain imposed on Burma a number of unequal treaties and in 1885, as a result of the third Burmese war, annexed the whole territory of Burma. ↑
In Victorian terms this might be said to be a piece of light pornography because it refers to a woman’s undergarment. ↑
1878-85 De-facto ruler Queen Supayalat of Burma. The daughter of King Mindon Min, she was married to her half-brother, Thibaw. In 1882 she assumed full control over the government of Upper Burma, and her rule was described as “sharp as a razor.” Thibaw was young, inexperienced, effete. According to one of Supayalat’s maids of honor, “No one could stand against her when she was angry … It were better to face a tigress. Every one bent and shivered before her, and whatever orders she gave were carried out. The King was but a foolish school-boy before her.” She is believed to have initiated the murder of around 100 members of the royal family. The situation was difficult with internal warfare and in 1885 Britain invaded the country and forced the king and Queen in exile in India. She had three daughters and lived (1859-1925). http://www.guide2womenleaders.com/womeninpower/Womeninpower1870.htm ↑
Critical review of a novel, The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh: The novel begins and ends in Burma, a country physically so close to us yet about which our ignorance and indifference have been abysmal. In our childhood we occasionally heard of rich Indian families who had come back from Burma to escape Japanese bombing. No school book taught us anything about the country’s past before it became part of the empire and I am embarrassed to admit that my first acquaintance with Mandalay and emperor Thebaw was through a silly Rudyard Kipling jingle about a British soldier and Burmese girl:

“Her petticoat was yellow and little coat was green
Her name was Supi-yaw-let, just the same as Thebaw’s queen”.

Thebaw’s proud queen, I am chastened to learn now from Amitav Ghosh’s book, was Supayalat, feared and admired blindly by the people of Burma. The unceremonious removal of the king and the pregnant queen from Mandalay to distant Ratnagiri in the west coast of India ( the reverse movement of Bahadur Shah Zafar’s deportation to Rangoon a generation ago ) was an astute move by the conquering British, successful in humiliating the royal couple completely, also erasing them from public memory at home. Forgotten and abandoned, the king and queen led a life of increasing shabbiness and obscurity in an unfamiliar territory while their country got depleted of its valuable natural resources – teak, ivory, petroleum. The rapacity and greed inherent in the colonial process is seen concentrated in what happened in Burma, and the author does not gloss over the fact that Indians were willing collaborators in this British enterprise of depredation.

Not only did two-thirds of the British army consist of Indians when Burma was conquered, years later the Saya San rebellion was brutally suppressed by deploying Indians soldiers. A small news item appeared in a Calcutta newspaper with the gruesome picture of sixteen decapitated heads on display but in the thirties the Indian public was too pre-occupied with its own national movement to notice what was happening in Burma. The novel also lays bare the process by which Indian agents became rich by transporting indentured labourer to work in the plantations. http://www.ch.8m.com/glasspalace.htm ↑
… like many Burmese women Supayalat was a smoker of cheroots, and there is a story that when she had been hustled out of the palace by the conquering British army in 1885, she asked a soldier for a light. At the time, according to Blackburn, she was “heavily pregnant.”

http://www.irrawaddy.org/aviewer.asp?a=3011&z=107

A Burmese cigar. I might be easy to suggest some carnal associations here; at least in the prejudiced minds of western men, women smoking cigars are at best eccentric, but also perhaps traditionally associated with promiscuous sex. ↑
While its true that Kipling parodies the smug Christian missionaries in Kim and invests the Lama with some sort of rustic charm and dignity, he can be casually irreverent to non-Christian icons in a way he would never be to Christ. Consider the following lines from ‘Mandalay’. An’ I seed her first a-smoking of a whackin’ white cheroot An’ a wastin’ Christian kisses on an ‘heathen idol’s foot: Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud– Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd– Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed ‘ er where she stud! On the road to Mandalay….

http://akbar.marlboro.edu/~birje/home.html ↑
There is an unwritten irony present here. The British (see the writings of George Orwell) did not fraternise with the natives in the East and practised an unwritten segregation, and a ‘written segregation’ on other exploited continents such as Africa (see writings of Doris Lessing). However, this would mainly concern the ‘officer class’. So the poem patronises both the ‘working class soldiers’, who are allowed to ‘fraternise’, and the inhabitants of this country who are only too keen to ‘fraternise’ when given the chance. ↑
Tame elephant ↑
Rudyard Kipling wrote a famous popular song that romanticized Mandalay, a town he never saw, and which was then being stripped bare of its teak forests leaving vast dustbowls. Fortunes were earned by the British exporters of Burma’s rice and precious stones. In the 1930s, companies were making profits of £12 million (£12,000,000), a huge amount in today’s terms. The oilfields became a byword for expatriate wealth, and these interests were protected by an Imperial army. http://www.tsujiru.net/moen/video_trans/014.html ↑
Bank – in the City of London – a centre of finance. The history of the Bank of England is interwoven with that of the East India Company and the Empire. ↑
The Suez Canal was bought by the British, guarded by British troops, and was a focal point of the British Empire increasing colonial trade (see background). ↑
Kipling knew that a British soldier was actually more likely to die of disease than in combat—a fact that was true up until the First World War. (In the Boer War the ratio was five to one.) Here comes the old flotilla on the road to Mandalay, guns primed to teach King Thebaw a lesson, no doubt. But look a little closer: “With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!” There you have the Kipling touch, the stroke of raw realism that stops the eye and turns the mood—like those broken dinner-knives. http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/18/mar00/kipling.htm ↑
Excerpt from the following book: Lycett, Andrew. 2003. “Barrack-Room Ballads | Rudyard Kipling.” Signet Classics. ↑
http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/Ballad (not available as of Dec. 2022). ↑
Poste don the following website: http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_music1.htm Date of reading 17 Dec. 2022. ↑
http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Compagnie_universelle_du_canal_maritime_de_Suez As of 9 Jan. 2023, this no longer seems to be available on the internet. ↑
http://www.kipling.org.uk/kip_fra.htm ↑
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/kipling-if.html ↑
http://www.businessballs.com/ifpoemrudyardkipling.htm ↑
https://www.atuttascuola.it/rudyard-kipling-5/ Read: 10 Jan. 2023. ↑
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/1457/early.htm ↑
Much of Kipling’s writing may be considered out of fashion today, and many of his views thought politically incorrect, but the popularity of his works has endured. If, Margaret Thatcher’s favourite poem, was written in 1910, but was recently voted the nation’s favourite poem by BBC viewers.

http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/gaslight/archive/99aug29.htm ↑
http://raysweb.net/ As of 10 Jan. 2023 this seems to have gone offline. ↑

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Study notes for the poem “Mandalay” by Rudyard Kipling

Contents

Preliminary note

Rudyard Kipling’s “Mandalay” – Notes by George Bliar^[2]

Colonial exploitation of a country’s natural resources

Don’t fraternise with the ‘natives’

“Rudyard Kipling”^[11] ^[12] by George Orwell

1942“Mandalay” – the poem

The poem with study notes (in the footnotes)

History of the poem

Introduction

Excerpt from Lycett’s book, “Barrack-Room Ballads | Rudyard Kipling.”

Metre, rhythm and musical aspect

Preliminary note

Ballad

Musical aspects of Kipling’s poetry

The following is an extract from “Kipling and Music” by Brian Mattinson^[36]

Background – Myanmar

Preliminary note

The Suez Canal^[37]

Old Moulmein Pagoda

RUDYARD KIPLING description

Brief comment on Orwell’s essay about Kipling

IF^[43] by Rudyard Kipling

“Mandalay and Me” by Ray Rasmussen^[44]

Comment on Ray

One Reply to “Study notes for the poem “Mandalay” by Rudyard Kipling”

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Contents

Preliminary note

Rudyard Kipling’s “Mandalay” – Notes by George Bliar[2]

Colonial exploitation of a country’s natural resources

Don’t fraternise with the ‘natives’

“Rudyard Kipling”[11] [12] by George Orwell

1942“Mandalay” – the poem

The poem with study notes (in the footnotes)

History of the poem

Introduction

Excerpt from Lycett’s book, “Barrack-Room Ballads | Rudyard Kipling.”

Metre, rhythm and musical aspect

Preliminary note

Ballad

Musical aspects of Kipling’s poetry

The following is an extract from “Kipling and Music” by Brian Mattinson[36]

Background – Myanmar

Preliminary note

The Suez Canal[37]

Old Moulmein Pagoda

RUDYARD KIPLING description

Brief comment on Orwell’s essay about Kipling

IF[43] by Rudyard Kipling

“Mandalay and Me” by Ray Rasmussen[44]

Comment on Ray

One Reply to “Study notes for the poem “Mandalay” by Rudyard Kipling”

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Rudyard Kipling’s “Mandalay” – Notes by George Bliar^[2]

“Rudyard Kipling”^[11] ^[12] by George Orwell

The following is an extract from “Kipling and Music” by Brian Mattinson^[36]

The Suez Canal^[37]

IF^[43] by Rudyard Kipling

“Mandalay and Me” by Ray Rasmussen^[44]