the discipline of meter 121
Mr. Kipling is a master of captivating sing-song, a magician of the catches
and refrains of melodies that trip and dance, and gaily, or mournfully,
or romantically, come and go, there has perhaps been no such master
before him in English; and he is this largely because he has had the wis-
dom to follow Burns, and with many of his ballads to popular or tradi-
tional airs, which must be allowed their share of the success. He is, so to
say, the Burns, not of steam, but of the music hall song.^36Le Gallienne’s criticism inspired a number of articles in Kipling’s defense, em-
phasizing the way that “since ‘the Recessional’ . . . and other poems of that
character, he has really become a great national influence.”^37 But despite the
fighting spirit with which Kipling is often associated, he was critical of empire
in the poem that was widely memorized and recited in praise of it. The respon-
sibility—what Kipling elsewhere called the burden—of the British Empire is
imagined linguistically, religiously, and even prosodically in “Recessional.”
Linguistic forgetting, in which tongues are wildly, frantically boasting, equates
the uneducated Englishman with the “lesser breed” who is “without the
Law”—both the Law of the Lord and the law of the Empire, though, for
schoolchildren there was no guarantee that this law included the law of verse.^38
That is, in line 21, his reference is to Romans 1:18 in which the gentiles are
instructed not to boast “against the branches. But if thou boast, thou bearest
not the root, but the root thee.” If the English boast supremacy over the colo-
nies, they forget that it is the colonies that support the Empire. Likewise, if the
entire imperial project forgets a higher order, then it will fail. John Le Vay
writes that in “Recessional,” Kipling is “clearly (though distantly) envisaging
the decline and fall of the British empire”^39 and yet the poem serves to revive
the Edwardian schoolchild’s allegiance to “country and King” by inscribing
Kipling’s meters in the minds of the impressionable young citizen. Kipling
highlights the alliterative four-beat lines throughout the beginning of the
poem: “Lord of our far-flung battle-line,” (2); “Hand we hold,” (3); “palm and
pine,” (4); “tumult . . . shouting,” (7); “Captains and the Kings,” (8); “Still
stands . . . sacrifice,” (9); “humble . . . heart” (10). In the third stanza, as the
“far-called” navies melt away, so too does the confident formal alliteration. The
warning of stanza 4, beseeching the Lord to “be with us yet” lest the Law is
replaced with “wild tongues,” stabilizes again by stanza 5 with the “heathen
heart” (25) now disciplined into industry, repeating “dust,” “dust,” “guarding,”
“guard” and “frantic,” “foolish.” The pathos of this repetition is also evocative
of the forgetting that the poem prescribes; the memorable lines “lest we for-
get” will not be forgotten, but the poem’s warning serves a dual purpose, then:
offering an apologia for the “untrained” and volatile tongues that British im-
perialism has loosed upon the world, and a promise, through repetition, to
train English subjects “within the Law” in order to differentiate them from the
“heathen heart.” Both linguistic and national, Kipling’s reiterated verse serves