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It's Tommy this and Tommy that and ‘Chuck ‘im out, the brute’, But it's ‘Saviour of ‘is country’ when the guns begin to shoot.
(‘Tommy’, W, 399)I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
(Epitaphs of the War: ‘A dead statesman’ W, 390)We fainted with our chins on the oars and you did not see. that we were idle, for we still swung to and fro.
Will you never let us go?
The salt made the oar-handles like shark-skin; our knees were cut to the bone with salt-cracks ; our hair was stuck to our foreheads; and our lips were cut to the gums, and you whipped us because we could not row.
Will you never let us go?
(‘Song of the Galley-Slaves’ W, 671)AMBIGUOUS CONSERVATISM
The ambiguous status of Kipling's poetry is aptly summed up by Dan Jacobson's exasperated tribute to ‘Kipling, a poet I cannot abide yet cannot stop reading’. Kipling is not always recognized as a poet at all, yet his endlessly popular ‘If –’ was in 1995 voted the ‘Nation's Favourite Poem’; more tellingly still, he is one of the few English poets besides Shakespeare whose words have entered common usage. George Orwell's 1941 remark that ‘Nothing could exceed the contempt of the New Statesman for Kipling, but how many times during the Munich period did the New Statesman find itself quoting that phrase about paying the Dane-geld?’ remains pertinent today, Kipling's poems – or bits of them – having taken on a life of their own, often in ways that would have greatly surprised their author. If you type wellknown phrases from Kipling's verse into the search engine ‘Google’, you find them cited on both extreme right-wing websites and others of utterly different persuasions. ‘Never the twain shall meet’ from the ‘Ballad of East and West’ (W, 234) has been used as the title for articles on gender relations, on bipolar mental disorder, on overspending, on school syllabi, and on the arts/science division in intellectual life, not to mention a book on telecommunications.
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