Hymnwriters From England

"By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea, There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me; For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say: “Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!”"

"Oh the road to Mandalay Where the flyin'-fishes play An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!"

"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, And the women come out to cut up what remains, Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains An' go to your Gawd like a soldier. Go, go, go like a soldier, Go, go, go like a soldier, Go, go, go like a soldier, So-oldier of the Queen!"

"If your officer's dead and the sergeants look white, Remember it's ruin to run from a fight: So take open order, lie down, and sit tight, And wait for supports like a soldier. Wait, wait, wait like a soldier..."

"When first under fire an' you're wishful to duck, Don't look nor take 'eed at the man that is struck, Be thankful you're livin', and trust to your luck And march to your front like a soldier. Front, front, front like a soldier..."

"'Ave you 'eard o' the Widow at Windsor With a hairy gold crown on 'er 'ead? She 'as ships on the foam—she 'as millions at 'ome, An' she pays us poor beggars in red."

"So I'll meet 'im later on At the place where 'e is gone— Where it's always double drill and no canteen. 'E'll be squattin' on the coals Givin' drink to poor damned souls, An' I'll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din! Yes, Din! Din! Din! You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din! Though I've belted you and flayed you, By the livin' Gawd that made you, You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!"

"You may talk o' gin and beer When you're quartered safe out 'ere, An' you're sent to penny-fights an' Aldershot it; But when it comes to slaughter You will do your work on water, An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it."

"For you all love the screw-guns the screw-guns they all love you! So when we take tea with a few guns, o' course you will know what to do—hoo! hoo! Jest send in your Chief an' surrender it's worse if you fights or you runs: You may hide in the caves, they'll be only your graves, but you can't get away from the guns!"

"'E's all 'ot sand an' ginger when alive An' 'e's generally shammin' when 'e's dead."

"So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan; You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man."

"For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' “Chuck him out, the brute!” But it's “Saviour of 'is country” when the guns begin to shoot."

"We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too, But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you; An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints, Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints."

"But he couldn't lie if you paid him and he'd starve before he stole."

"They've taken of his buttons off an' cut his stripes away, An' they're hangin' Danny Deever in the mornin'."

"“What are the bugles blowin' for?” said Files-on-Parade. “To turn you out, to turn you out”, the Colour-Sergeant said."

"For the colonel's lady an' Judy O'Grady, Are sisters under their skins."

"I've taken my fun where I've found it, An' now I must pay for my fun, For the more you 'ave known o' the others The less will you settle to one."

"An' I learned about women from 'er."

"I've taken my fun where I've found it; I've rogued an' I've ranged in my time."

"And oft-times cometh our wise Lord God, master of every trade, And tells them tales of His daily toil, of Edens newly made; And they rise to their feet as He passes by, gentlemen unafraid."

"'Take your friend away. He has done with Hanuman, but Hanuman has not done with him.'"

"From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than anyone has ever known it. Dickens knew its clothes and its comedy. Mr. Kipling knows its essence and its seriousness. He is our first authority on the second-rate, and has seen marvellous things through keyholes, and his backgrounds are real works of art."

"As one turns over the pages of his Plain Tales from the Hills, one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity. The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle one's eyes."

"Kipling... brought a sense of religious destiny back into a disorganized world. He was able, in fact, to render an immense service to his age, and it is no wonder that in his later years, when it became apparent that that age had passed forever,he refused to recognize the change, and raised a disgruntled pretense that nothing was happening save an outburst of misconduct on the part of the intellectuals and the lower classes. It is no wonder that he should want to do so, human nature being as frail as it is; but it is surprising that the writer of the masterpiece Kim should have found himself able to do so."

"...still more would I like to know about the brain history of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, whom also I have never met. He is to me the most incomprehensible of my contemporaries, with phases of real largeness and splendour and lapses to the quality of those mucky little sadists, Stalky and Co. ... He has an immense vogue in the British middle-class and upper-class home ; he is the patron saint of cadet corps masters, an inexhaustive fount of sham manly sentiment, and one of the most potent forces in the shrivelling of the British political imagination during the past third of a century."

"He [Kipling] is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man — and I am the other one. Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known and I know the rest."

"I still keep beside me a whole anthology of all his poems and all his books, and this is one that just typifies every single thing about what liberty means to, to we British, although it's about the English. And it all goes back to Runnymede, because the history of liberty in this country is the history, as the baron said to the king, you've got too much power, we want it more widely distributed. And the barons to the squires and members of parliament, and then we've distributed the property and rights more and more widely. And this is the history how it started at Runnymede, and it's called The Reeds of Runnymede."

"Kipling has done more than any other since Disraeli to show the world that the British race is sound at core and that rust or dry rot are strangers to it."

"Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language."

"In the stupid early years of this century, the blimps, having at last discovered someone who could be called a poet and who was on their side, set Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as ‘If’, were given almost biblical status. But it is doubtful whether the blimps have ever read him with attention, any more than they have read the Bible. Much of what he says they could not possibly approve. Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot."

"Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly."

"Mr. Kipling's world is a barrack full of oaths and clatter of sabres ; but his language is copious, rich, sonorous. One is tempted to say that none since the Elizabethans has written so copiously. Others have written more beautifully, but no one that I can call to mind at this moment has written so copiously. Shelley and Wordsworth, Landor and Pater, wrote with part of the language; but who else, except Whitman, has written with the whole language since the Elizabethans?"

"The social attitudes of an author writing about animals always emerge with exceptional clarity. Kipling's stories are imperialistic, his mongoose belongs to the white man, it is the Englishman's servant. Only a European with a highly developed sense of his own responsibility toward life, with a cautious and aroused conscience, could write animal stories in the style of Pergaud. The weasel, the crow, and the magpie are his heroes. They serve no one, instead they introduce us to the basic tenors and joys of existence."

"Vladimir Nabokov-to me, his is not a good prose style...But then a writer like Kipling comes to mind, whose style is very idiosyncratic, rather strange, and, particularly in his finest things, in some of the children's books, is deliberately rather splendid and very rhythmical and totally oral. I love it."

"There are certain writers-Kipling is a very good case in point-he is an embarrassment partly because of his politics, but also partly because his greatest books are for children. Kim is a child's book. It is and it isn't. I read it first at ten, and I've read it ever since. But Kipling is not really a novelist, is he? He's a tale-teller, and he doesn't fit in the canon any more than Tolkien does, for different reasons. I think you might find other writers like that. Of course, Kipling's subjects are often exotic, they're not the ordinary subjects of literature, he personifies ships, his tales partake of fantasy and science fiction and all kinds of things. He didn't write within the realist canon. His stuff was odd. There are writers whom we don't think of as "paraliterary" writers, but who have suffered nearly as much from ignorance or neglect or our inability to know how to criticize them, which I think is one of the main problems..."

"I believe that the three writers of the nineteenth century who had the greatest natural talents were D'Annunzio, Kipling and Tolstoy - it's strange that all three had semi-fanatic ideas about religion or about patriotism."

"Mr. Rudyard Kipling is distinguished above all things for his imperialistic views. Altho he has literary qualifications of the highest merit, it is to be regretted that he has devoted them to the propagation of warlike ideas and exhibited a most barbarous spirit of chauvinism during the Boer War."

"Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known."

"I can think of a number of poets who have written great poetry, only of a very few whom I should call great verse writers. And unless I am mistaken, Kipling's position in this class is not only high but unique."

"An immense gift for using words, an amazing curiosity and power of observation with his mind and with all his senses, the mask of the entertainer, and beyond that a queer gift of second sight, of transmitting messages from elsewhere, a gift so disconcerting when we are made aware of it that thenceforth we are never sure when it is not present: all this makes Kipling a writer impossible wholly to understand and quite impossible to belittle."

"His poems in their quantity, their limitation to one feeling at a time, have the air of brilliant tactical improvisations to overcome sudden unforeseen obstacles, as if, for Kipling, experience were not a seed to cultivate patiently and lovingly, but an unending stream of dangerous feelings to be immediately mastered as they appear."

"Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story."

"... it's always best to tell the truth."

"... scandals are only increased by hushing them up."

"I speak now from my home and from my heart to you all; to men and women so cut off by the snows, the desert, or the sea, that only voices out of the air can reach them."

"That's the secret. 'Tisn't beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just It. Some women'll stay in a man's memory if they once walk down a street."

"Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin' up and down again! There's no discharge in the war!"

"Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges— Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!"

"Who hath desired the Sea?—the sight of salt water unbounded— The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber wind-hounded?"