Okay. Here's that other poem, and I'm done.
I admire it no end, its skill, its wit, its
startling good sense. It reminds me of another
reason that Kipling is not read and loved as he
once was---he tells us hard truths that we'd
rather not be told, punctures our illusions,
reminds us how destructive our utopian dreams
are. (I don't have the book at hand, so I'll
copy it out from memory and can't vouch for all
the punctuation &c.)

THE GODS OF THE COPYBOOK HEADINGS

As I pass through my incarnations, in every age
and place,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the
Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers, I watch them
totter and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice,
outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They
showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would
certainly burn;
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and
Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas, while we
followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered
their pace,
Being neither cloud- nor wind-borne like the Gods
of the Market-Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and
presently word would come
That a tribe had been swept off its icefield, or
the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the hopes that this World is built on, they were
utterly out of touch;
They denied that the Moon was Stilton, they denied she
was even Dutch---
They denied that Wishes were Horses, they denied that a
Pig had Wings---
So we turned to the Gods of the Market, who promised
these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, they promised
perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of
the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed they sold us and delivered us bound
to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to
the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian sandstone, we were promised the
Fuller Life
(Which began by loving our neighbor and ended by loving
his wife),
Till the women had no more children, and the men lost
reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages
of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch, we were promised abundance
for all
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul,
But though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our
money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you
don't work, you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-
tongued Wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to
believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, that Two and Two
make Four,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain
it once more.

* * * *

As it will be in the Future, so it was at the Birth of
Man:
There are only four things certain since Social Progress
began,
That the Dog returns to his Vomit, that the Sow returns
to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back
to the Fire,
And when all of this is accomplished and the brave new
world begins,
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay
for his sins,
Then surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will
burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter
return!

Robert, the poem is wonderful, and I know there's a lot more where that came from. Maybe we'll see Kipling's stock begin to rise as another generation of anthologists, critics, and teachers begins to question the judgment of its predecessors. In schools there will remain, I think, the problems of what to leave out in order to put him in and of what to say about him. Now that the quarter system has even more severely limited the amount that students can be expected to read, and with teachers always looking for poems obscure enough that explicating them makes them feel they're earning their keep, how much Kipling is likely to make its way onto the reading lists? Completely aside from unjust condemnation of his politics (and that's a big aside), I'd be surprised to see him get a whole week. How much Browning or Tennyson gets into a survey course now? I would be quite happy just to see him no longer used as a touchstone for the bad taste of the past; I'd be thrilled to see him restored to the pantheon. Of course, as the Eratosphere demonstrates, outside the schools there's a great big world of poets and readers, and I'm not at all sure that he has ever been ignored by them.
Richard

Keep Kipling out of the Schools, Sir? Why, keep him in, I say, and let him learn his place.

Seriously, you remember Nabokov's nun, who complained about "spooning" in class? We must be glad, Sir... they were not Kipling.

Robert, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" is wonderful and completely new to me. Why doesn't someone put together an anthology of witty, cranky poems that won't pass the political litmus test? Include this, a stack of Larkin, a bundle of Frost...there's some Auden that would fit nicely.
Richard

Well, from "mere sound" to "witty crank" in less than a seminar. I expect to make my author a full Professor by Pomp & Circumstance time.

[This message has been edited by Christopher Mulrooney (edited February 07, 2001).]

CM, neither "witty crank" nor "mere sound" quotes me accurately, nor do they accurately paraphrase anything I've said. I referred to Kipling's wonderful sound, and I said that one particular poem was witty and cranky. Both statements are far from those you attribute to me. I'm also puzzled by your post suggesting that I somehow advocated keeping Kipling's poetry out of the schools.
Richard

Thank you so much, Robert, for posting the Kipling poems. I didn't think much of the first, but "Gods of the Copybook Headings" is superlative. What a pleasure to read it again. It must be thirty years since I saw it last, and I was too young to appreciate it enough. Tim tells me that you have an extraordinary memory, and you've certainly proven the point---though I haven't checked your punctuation!

Alan Sullivan

I was mistaken. But calling as extraordinarily conscious, elaborated and confident a poem as "The Gods of the Copybook Maxims [or Headings]" cranky is like calling "Le Cimetière Marin" self-hypnosis.

Kipling's poem is self-evidently one of the great works of the 20th century, and certainly gives you an idea of the poet's range and emotion.



[This message has been edited by Christopher Mulrooney (edited February 09, 2001).]

Clearly what Richard meant by cranky was just
heterodox, against the grain, politically incorrect.
And it would make a terrific anthology---not only
Larkin, Frost, Kipling, Auden, but Amis, Suckling,
Gavin Ewart, Pope (and Hope and Cope), &c, and I'd
probably include my version of Horace's III, 3---
his savage epistle to the Romans (my adaptation is
addressed of course to the Americans). Well, if
I'm fated to write no more poems, maybe I'll take
it on; it would be fun.

Heterodox? They don't even give them sheepskins anymore!

But all seriousness aside, no room at the Inner Sanctum, huh? The argument, which has no more to do with my topic than Robert Mezey's near-Funesian memory (l.3, "flourish and fall"), has been that teaching Kipling would take class time from Browning and Tennyson, for example. "Is it not expedient... and Pilate's hands rustling in your mind... " It's not how much time you spend on a thing, it's what you make of it (cf. Whistler v. Ruskin). So let's have no more talk of abbreviating the canon (I hear Ez singing Mozart, "Per vendere cannoni, per vendere cannoni"), "a few thousand battered books." H'et h'ego h'in h'Academia!

Is this mere Whiggishness of the most ancient and venerable kind, bilious on billeted Brits at the ancestral manse? We are at peace, RW, with England; now, if only you could be persuaded not to teach Kipling at all.



[This message has been edited by Christopher Mulrooney (edited February 12, 2001).]