Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and patriotism

called it 'inalienably mine.'" 41 Like England's official Laureate, the Anglo-
Indian Kipling hoped to write the "song that nerves a nation's heart."
Where Tennyson traced the chivalric patriotic ballad of Maud to a great
hall, however, Kipling sought inspiration from imperial barrack-rooms and
urban music-halls. In place of the pure tones of Tennyson's aristocratic
maiden, he often set the voices of working-class soldiers whose rowdy slang
is often not even entirely English in origin. Suggestively, the poem Kipling
considered his best is a national hymn. 42 "Recessional" (1897), which
commemorates the Diamond Jubilee (England's celebration of Victoria's
sixty-year reign), appeared only after the festivities had ended. The poem's
tone is one of anticipatory elegiac. "Far-called, our navies melt away" (RK
327), begins the fourth stanza; and though the literal reference is to the
departure of colonial and imperial celebrants, another application is
irresistible: "Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and
Tyre!" The poem becomes, in fact, less a culmination of the Jubilee than a
prayer for divine forgiveness of such jubilation:

For heathen heart that puts her trust

In reeking tube and iron shard,

All valiant dust that builds on dust,

And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,

For frantic boast and foolish word -

Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord! (32.7)

By 1901, "Recessional" had entered not only the Oxford Book of English
Verse but also the hymnbook of the Church of England. 43 Not coinciden-
tally, as Ann Parry notes, it was also performed by some 10,000 British
soldiers in a Boer War victory ceremony outside the Parliament of the
Transvaal. 44 For in its very humility, this is still triumphant music. A
recessional, after all, is sung after holy services; and in warning of Britain's
spiritual (and hence national) dangers, Kipling's national hymn addresses a
God prepared to give "His" British "People" dominion, over not only
"palm and pine" but also "lesser breeds without the Law."
Of "The Absent-Minded Beggar" (1899), in contrast, Parry reports that
Kipling "wryly observed that were it not suicide he would have shot the
man who wrote it." 45 First published in the "independent and imperial"
Daily Mail, and later set to music by Arthur Sullivan, "The Absent-Minded
Beggar" annexed the power of the music hall to the ends of military charity.
Printed on everything from tobacco jars to souvenir triptychs, the poem
netted £250,000 for soldiers' widows and orphans within months. 46 As
with "Recessional," the title says a great deal. "Absent-minded" Tommy
Atkins, the stereotypic comic Cockney soldier, has run off and left "a lot of

269