daniel karlin
We’ll never read the papers now without inquirin’ first
Forword from all those friendly dorps where you was born an’ nursed.
Why, Dawson, Galle, an’ Montreal—Port Darwin—Timaru,
They’re only just across the road! Good-bye—good luck to you!^20The same slight inconsistency as in ‘Chant-Pagan’—‘north and south’, ‘rank an’
file’—suggests a larger uncertainty, as though Kipling had lost faith in his gift, not
for ‘word o’ mouth’ but for words from the horse’s mouth. But he still had the
gift; it is there in ‘Lichtenberg’, where the smell of wattle brings ‘all Australia’ to a
horseman from New South Wales:
There was some silly fire on the flank
And the small wet drizzling down—
There were the sold-out shops and the bank
And the wet, wide-open town;
Andwe were doing escort-duty
To somebody’s baggage-train,
And I smelt wattle by Lichtenberg,
Riding in, in the rain.
·····
And I saw Sydney the same as ever,
The picnics and brass-bands;
And my little homestead on Hunter River
And my new vines joining hands.
It all came over me in one act
Quick as a shot through the brain—
With the smell of the wattle round Lichtenberg,
Riding in, in the rain.^21‘Fire’ in line 1 is both the opposite of ‘wet’ in line 2, yet a different thing; asilly
thing, too, as irritating as a drizzle, yet perfectly capable of killing you—‘Quick as a
shot through the brain’—rather than just making you wet and uncomfortable. And
the small word ‘And’ is beautifully deployed in the two stanzas: first to suggest how
the monotony and drudgery which are intrinsic to war can be suddenly, magically
undone (they were firing at us, and it was raining, and the town was just like
all other towns,andwe were bored stiff—and I smelt wattle...); and then the
beautiful linking together of memory in whichandjoins the scenes like the ‘new
vines joining hands’.
(^20) Kipling, ‘The Parting of the Columns’, ibid. 469–70. A ‘dorp’ is a (South African) Dutch word
for a village or small town.
(^21) Kipling, ‘Lichtenberg’, ibid. 476. The ‘small wet drizzling down’ may have been suggested by the
medieval lyric ‘Westron wynde’, ‘Westron wynde when wyll thow blow,|The small rayne downe can
rayne—|Cryst, yf my love wer in my armys|And I in my bed agayne!’ (this text from Christopher
Ricks (ed.),The Oxford Book of English Verse(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 14). Kipling’s
poem has erotic longing as well as longing for homeland; the last three lines have the exclamation ‘Ah,
Christ!’ and rhyme ‘again’ with ‘rain’.