Selected Poems

PENGUIN ENGLISH POETS

GENERAL EDITOR: CHRISTOPHER RICKS

RUDYARD KIPLING: SELECTED POEMS

RUDYARD JOSEPH KIPLING was born in Bombay in 1865. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was the author and illustrator of Beast and Man in India, and his mother, Alice, was the sister of Lady Burne-Jones. In 1871 Kipling was brought home from India and spent five unhappy years with a foster family in Southsea, an experience he later drew on in The Light that Failed (1891). The years he spent at the United Services College, a school for officers’ children, are depicted in Stalky & Co. (1899) and the character of Beetle is something of a self-portrait. It was during his time at the college that he began writing poetry and Schoolboy Lyrics was published privately in 1881. In the following year he started work as a journalist in India, and while there produced a body of work, stories, sketches and poems – notably Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) – which made him an instant literary celebrity when he returned to England in 1889. Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) contains some of his most popular pieces, including ‘Mandalay’, ‘Gunga Din’ and ‘Danny Deever’. In this collection Kipling experimented with form and dialect, notably the cockney accent of the soldier poems, but the influence of hymns, music-hall songs, ballads and public poetry can be found throughout his verse.

In 1892 he married an American, Caroline Balestier, and from 1892 to 1896 they lived in Vermont, where Kipling wrote The Jungle Book, published in 1894. In 1901 came Kim and in 1902 the Just So Stories. Tales of every kind – including historical and science fiction – continued to flow from his pen but Kim is generally thought to be his greatest long work, putting him high among the chroniclers of British expansion.

From 1902 Kipling made his home in Sussex, but he continued to travel widely and caught his first glimpse of warfare in South Africa, where he wrote some excellent reportage on the Boer War. However, many of the views he expressed were rejected by anti-imperialists who accused him of jingoism and love of violence. Though rich and successful, he never again enjoyed the literary esteem of his early years. With the onset of the Great War his work became a great deal more sombre. The stories he subsequently wrote, A Diversity of Creatures (1917), Debits and Credits (1926) and Limits and Renewals (1932), are now thought by many to contain some of his finest writing. The death of his only son in 1915 also contributed to a new inwardness of vision. Kipling refused to accept the role of Poet Laureate and other civil honours, but he was the first English writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1907. He died in 1936 and his autobiographical fragment Something of Myself was published the following year.

PETER KEATING was Reader in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh until 1990 when he retired to become a full-time writer. His publications include The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction, Into Unknown England, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914, which received a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, and Kipling the Poet. He has also edited Matthew Arnold’s Selected Prose and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford/Cousin Phillis for Penguin Classics.

The Kipling Society, founded in 1927, is a literary society for all who enjoy the prose and poetry of Rudyard Kipling. For inquiries, write to The Honorary Secretary, 6 Clifton Road, London W9 1SS.

Rudyard Kipling

Selected Poems

Edited by PETER KEATING

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First published 1993

Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2000

The moral right of the editor has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-141-92216-4

Preface

Table of Dates

Preface

Kipling began writing poetry, or ‘verse’ as he was always to call it, as a young child. While a schoolboy at the United Services College he contributed poems regularly to the college magazine, which he also edited. In 1881, when he was sixteen years old and still at school, his parents in India arranged, without consulting him, for the publication of a collection of his poems which they called Schoolboy Lyrics. The following year he joined his parents in India, taking a job as assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore. During the seven years he spent working for the Gazette, and for its sister paper the Pioneer in Allahabad, he wrote and published, in addition to his day-by-day journalism, an enormous number of stories and poems. He also collaborated with his family in the publication of two slim volumes – Echoes (1884), a collection of verse parodies written with his sister Trix, and Quartette (1885), a Christmas annual to which all four members of the family contributed. Some of the poetry written at school and in India Kipling reprinted in later editions of his work, but the greater part of it he left uncollected.

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Rudyard Kipling

Selected Poems

Contents

Preface

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