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TO GETHSEMANE:
RUDYARD KIPLING’S
WAR POETRY
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In 1920 George Saintsbury dedicatedNotes on a Cellar-Bookto Kipling, not as a
fellow wine-lover but as ‘the best poet and taleteller of his generation’. Of course he
didn’t need much excuse; wine and verse have a long-standing (or long-staggering)
association. But Saintsbury gave his genial literary compliment a polemical edge.
Kipling was not merely ‘the best poet and taleteller of his generation’, but ‘one
than whom no living Englishman has done more to foster the spirit that won in
1914–18’.^1 If we remember, however, the less agreeable meaning of ‘taleteller’, we
might think of Kipling’s own look in the mirror, in the most anguished of the
Epitaphs of the War, ‘Common Form’:
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.^2(^1) George Saintsbury,Notes on a Cellar-Book(London: Macmillan, 1920). For Kipling’s response,
seeThe Letters of Rudyard Kipling,v:1920–1930, ed. Thomas Pinney (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2004),
7and22–3.
(^2) Rudyard Kipling,Epitaphs of the War,inThe Definitive Edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Verse(London:
Hodder & Stoughton, 1989), 390.Epitaphs of the Warwas first published inThe Years Between(1919),
with the titleEpitaphs. The ‘Definitive Edition’ was first published in 1940; it does not always give the
original provenance of poems, and does not consistently follow an order of composition or publication.