Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936)
British author and poet, born in India.
The Liner she's a lady, an' she never looks nor 'eeds—
The Man-o'-War's 'er 'usband, an' 'e gives 'er all she needs;
But, oh, the little cargo-boats, that sail the wet seas roun',
They're just the same as you an' me a-plyin' up an' down!
... it's always best to tell the truth.
“What are the bugles blowin' for?” said Files-on-Parade.
“To turn you out, to turn you out”, the Colour-Sergeant said.
I have eaten your bread and salt.
I have drunk your water and wine.
The deaths ye died I have watched beside
And the lives ye led were mine.
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We have fed our sea for a thousand years
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead.
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: "A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East."
Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.
I have written the tale of our life
For a sheltered people's mirth,
In jesting guise—but ye are wise,
And ye know what the jest is worth.
Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behin the Ranges—
Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!
But that's another story.
Ever the wide world over, lass,
Ever the trail held true,
Over the world and under the world,
And back at the last to you.
Father, Mother, and Me,
Sister and Auntie say
All the people like us are We,
And every one else is They.
We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart;
But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: “It's clever, but is it Art?”
Cities and Thrones and Powers,
Stand in Time's eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,
The Cities rise again.
I am the cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.
When next he came to me he was drunk—royally drunk on many poets for the first time revealed to him. His pupils were dilated, his words tumbled over each other, and he wrapped himself in quotations—as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors.
We pulled for you when the wind was against us and the sails were low.
Will you never let us go?
Now I possess and am possessed of the land where I would be,
And the curve of half Earth's generous breast shall soothe and ravish me!
For all we have and are,
For all our children's fate,
Stand up and take the war.
The Hun is at the gate!