daniel karlin
The ships have a thousand eyes
Tomark where we come...
Butthemirthofaseaportdies
When our blow gets home.^36I think the ellipsis is the track of a torpedo through the water; certainly Kipling
never made a grimmer play on words than the phrase ‘gets home’, which is just
what the drowned sailors will never do. But the seaport might be Portsmouth or
Cherbourg as much as Hamburg or Rostock.
I do not mean that such poems are colourless; they are not the conception
of a neutral, but of an embattled and tormented Englishman; they breathe their
Englishness in form and diction. But they do not—cannot, in their very integ-
rity—deny that they might be transposed, translated. ‘Gethsemane’, to take a last
example, is bred-in-the-bone English, drawing its name magic from the English
Bible, its lilt from a ballad tradition going back 500 years, its word-play from a
poem by Christina Rossetti; you couldn’t substitute ‘German’ for ‘English’ in the
fourth line without doing violence to the poem (not to mention that the Germans
would not have been welcomed by pretty girls in Picardy); even the observation
of social difference has a native English ring.^37 Yet despite all this—through it
all—the poem is not one-sided, does not hug its suffering to its national self. Beside
it, poems like ‘Justice’ or ‘The Beginnings’ seem pinched and thin, linguistically and
spiritually malnourished:
The Garden called Gethsemane
In Picardy it was,
And there the people came to see
The English soldiers pass.
We used to pass—we used to pass
Or halt, as it might be,
And ship our masks in case of gas
Beyond Gethsemane.
The Garden called Gethsemane,
It held a pretty lass,(^36) Kipling, ‘ ‘‘Tin Fish’’ ’, 648.
(^37) Kipling, ‘Gethsemane’, ibid. 98; 1st pub. inTwenty Poems by Rudyard Kipling(1918). It is oddly
placed in theDefinitive Edition, coming between two unrelated (and jarring) pieces, ‘The Broken
Men’ (1902, about genteel bankrupts fleeing abroad) and ‘The Song of the Banjo’ (1894). Jesus prays
in Gethsemane: ‘O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me’ (Matt. 26: 39); Kipling’s
tact suppresses the remainderof the verse—‘nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt’—which
would sound false in the speaker’smouth. Christina Rossetti’s ‘May’ begins, ‘I cannot tell you how it
was;|But this I know: it came to pass—|Upon a bright and breezy day|When May was young, ah
pleasant May!’, followed by this mournful turn: ‘I cannot tell you how it was;|ButthisIknow:itdid
but pass.|It passed away with sunny May,|With all sweet things it passed away,|And left me old, and
cold, and grey’ (inThe Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, ed. R. W. Crump, 3 vols. (Baton Rouge,
La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), i. 51).