Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and patriotism

popular Victorian poetry took particular pleasure in dramatizing such ties
within the context of doomed imperial heroism. In Francis H. Doyle's
widely circulated "The Red Thread of Honour" (1844), for example,
"wild" Muslim robbers accord dead Englishmen a ritual symbol of courage
denied even to their own greatest warriors, 48 while in Henry Newbolt's
"Guides at Cabul, 1879," Afghani soldiers fight on even after their British
"masters" have been killed. 49 From this latter poem it is a short step to
Kipling's "Ballad of East and West" (1899) whose opening and closing
stanza has entered popular culture in suggestively repressed form. "O East
is East, and West is West," the stanza begins, "and never the twain shall
meet" (RK 233). But then it continues:

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the

ends of the earth! (23 3)

In the body of the poem, the courage of a British colonel's son inspires
Kamal (a daring Indian border thief) to send his own son to serve under the
Briton "who leads a troop" of "Guides" (236). East and West are essentially
alien; Englishmen are models to the world; the British are born to rule;
strong men are essentially alike. Such paradoxical assumptions structure
Kipling's poetry, two of whose most famous lines have become "Take up
the White Man's burden" ("The White Man's Burden" [1899; RK 321]),
and "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din" ("Gunga Din" [1899; RK
406]).
"The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood and stone," begins
Kipling's "The 'Eathen" (1896; RK 449): '"E don't obey no orders unless
they is 'is own; / 'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about, / An'
then comes up the Regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out" (449). The joke is
most obviously on the naive narrator, a former " 'eathen" from what
became known in the 1890s as "Darkest London," to whom military
discipline has offered a sort of salvation. On another level, however, in this
speaker's world as in much of Kipling's writing, to be a British civilian is to
be "a 'eathen." Thus Kipling lends unpredictable form to the late-Victorian
civic religion of the nation state.

"Me that 'ave been what I've been," begins "Chant-Pagan" (1903; RK
453). "Me that 'ave gone where I've gone - / Me that 'ave seen what I've
seen - / 'Ow can I ever take on / With awful old England again?" The poem
ends:

I know of a sun an' a wind,

An' some plains and a mountain be'ind,

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