What a relief---it didn't vanish after all, but reappeared
as mysteriously as it disappeared.
Like most of his fellow citizens, Kipling certainly
believed in the British Empire (however critical he
could be, however sympathetic to the hard life of the
Indian peasant), but that's neither here nor there.
He is a marvelous poet, perhaps a great poet; it's
worth remembering that Frost, Robinson, Hardy, Auden
Borges etc. thought him a great poet. The reason
that most contemporary poets and readers scorn him
is that he wrote in meter and rhyme, made clear sense,
wrote a lot of excellent didactic poetry, a genre which
is nowadays held in low esteem, was a patriotic man,
etc etc, and in addition, they have never read much
of his work and just assent to received opinion. He
is read, if at all, in anthologies and the selections
are rarely good. They don't usually include anything
in the lyric mode, though Kipling wrote several very
moving poems, like "The Way through the Woods" and "Harp
Song of the Dane Women"---or this one:
Cities and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time's eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth
The Cities rise again.
This season's Daffodil,
She never hears
What change, what chance, what chill,
Cut down last year's;
But with bold countenance,
And knowledge small,
Esteems her seven days' continuance
To be perpetual.
So Time that is o'er-kind
To all that be,
Ordains us e'en as blind,
As bold as she:
That in our very death,
And burial sure,
Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith,
"See how our works endure!"
Tomorrow I'll copy out another masterpiece. (And if
you don't know his fiction, well, he was a master of
that too.) One of the best short pieces about Kipling's
poetry is by W. H. Auden, entitled, if memory serves,
"A Poet of the Encirclement"---terrific essay.
More later.
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