from dark defile to gethsemane Me that ’ave seen what I’ve seen—
’Owcan I ever take on
With awful old England again,
An’ ’ouses both sides of the street,
And ’edges both sides of the lane,
And the parson an’ gentry between,
An’ touchin’ my ’at when we meet—
Me that ’ave been what I’ve been?
Me that ’ave watched ’arf a world
’Eave up all shiny with dew,
Kopje on kop to the sun,
An’ as soon as the mist let ’em through
Our ’elios winkin’ like fun—
Three sides of a ninety-mile square,
Over valleys as big as a shire—
‘Are ye there? Are ye there? Are ye there?’
An’ then the blind drum of our fire...
An’ I’m rollin’ ’is lawns for the Squire,
Me!^19The sublime is here pressed into service against the servility of ‘awful old England’.
The man who has risen to the height of ‘Kopje on kop’ sinks back in the social scale;
his pained exclamation, ‘’Ow’, is absorbed into ‘’ouses’, and muffled; ‘three sides
of a ninety mile square’ have shrunk to those sharp-edged ‘’edges both sides of the
lane’. ‘Both sides’ plays against ‘three sides’; England’s boundaries close in on you,
while in South Africa vistas are possible.
As a work of social criticism in verse, ‘Chant-Pagan’ is artfully done, but
asapoemitislessenedbythatveryquality.Asmallslip—onethatKipling
would not have committed inBarrack-Room Ballads—has the speaker wobbling
in lines 6–9 between ‘An’’ and ‘And’, as though his register were shifting between
demotic and educated. There is social criticism inBarrack-Room Ballads too,
but it comes naturally to the speakers and stays in character; in ‘Chant-Pagan’
Kipling is too eager to prompt. Poetry becomes a platform for exhortation, and the
expression—however passionate, however witty—of opinions rather than feelings.
Even in the poems of ‘Service Songs’ which strive to be most like the oldBarrack-
Room Ballads, this deflection of imaginative sympathy into salesmanship is evident.
‘The Parting of the Columns’ wants to convey the message of imperial solidarity
between the ‘rank an’ file’ of Britain and her dominions, and succeeds only in an
embarrassingly unconvincing ventriloquism:
We’ve seen your ’ome by word o’ mouth, we’ve watched your rivers shine,
We’ve ’eard your bloomin’ forests blow of eucalyp’ and pine;
Your young, gay countries north and south, we feel we own ’em too,
For they was made by rank an’ file. Good bye—good luck to you!(^19) Kipling, ‘Chant-Pagan’, inRudyard Kipling’s Verse, 461.