In the late years of Queen Victoria’s reign and the early years of the Twentieth Century, Rudyard Kipling was far and away England’s most popular poet. And the most celebrated world-wide as well. He was the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize, and to this day is still the youngest.
He was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) of English parents and was educated in England. When he returned to India, he became a journalist and began writing short stories and poems to great success. In his life he traveled extensively but said, “There are only two places in the world where I want to live – Bombay and Brattleboro.” He then . . . whoa! . . . did he say Brattleboro as in Brattleboro, Vermont? Yes. One of the prime voices in the British Empire said that? Exactly so.
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It happened that in England he met and married an American girl. She had family in Vermont, and they decided to honeymoon there. Kipling fell in love with the land and the locals and built a substantial house overlooking the Connecticut River Valley and in the distance Mount Monadnock. The dwelling stood on sufficient acreage that when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dropped by, he taught Kipling how to play golf.
The house, three miles north of Brattleboro, is now operated by The Landmark Trust and can be rented for short vacation stays. Some of Kipling’s furnishings are still in place.
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Catching the local spirit, Kipling wrote a poem called “Pan in Vermont.” It suggests that spring is coming and so is the seed agent with his catalogue of seeds and plants. Many of these will not be productive, though one always hopes.
It’s forty in the shade to-day the spouting eaves declare;
The boulders nose above the drift, the southern slopes are bare;
Hub-deep in slush Apollo’s car swings north along the Zodiac.
Good lack, the Spring is back, and Pan is on the road!
(What though his phlox and hollyhocks ere half a month demised?
What though his ampelopsis clambered not as advertised?
Though every seed was guaranteed and every standard true—
Forget, forgive they did not live! Believe, and buy anew!)
Serene, assenting, unabashed, he writes our orders down:—
Blue Asphodel on all our paths-a few true bays for crown—
Uncankered bud, immortal flower, and leaves that never fall—
Apples of Gold, of Youth, of Health—and—thank you, Pan, that’s all.
He’s off along the drifted pent to catch the Windsor train,
And swindle every citizen from Keene to Lake Champlain;
But where his goat’s-hoof cut the crust—beloved, look below—
He’s left us (I’ll forgive him all) the may-flower ’neath her snow!
Many critics believe that the four years Kipling spent in Vermont were the most creative of his life. Consider both “Jungle Books,” the novel “Captains Courageous,” the best of the “Just So Stories,” a collection of short stories called “The Day’s Work,” and a host of memorable poems. Among these is that masterpiece of stoicism called simply “If.” In a survey by the BBC, it was named Britain’s favorite poem. You’ll remember how it opens:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master,
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
The next two lines have been inscribed above the players’ entrance to Center Court at Wimbledon:
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same.
And the poem ends:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
When Kipling moved to Vermont in 1892, he was already becoming internationally famous, and his exchequer was filling rapidly. His latest book, “Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses had just been published, and the world was relishing “Gunga Din,” “Danny Deever,” “The Widow at Windsor” and these rollicking stanzas:
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at 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!”
Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay;
Can’t you ‘ear their paddles clunkin’ from Rangoon to Mandalay?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!
But that’s all shove be’ind me — long ago and fur away,
An’ there ain’t no ‘buses runnin’ from the Bank to Mandalay;
An’ I’m learnin’ ‘ere in London what the ten-year soldier tells:
“If you’ve ‘eard the East a-callin’, you won’t never ‘eed naught else.”
No! you won’t ‘eed nothin’ else
But them spicy garlic smells,
An’ the sunshine an’ the palm-trees an’ the tinkly temple-bells;
On the road to Mandalay …
I am sick ‘o wastin’ leather on these gritty pavin’-stones,
An’ the blasted English drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho’ I walks with fifty ‘ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An’ they talks a lot o’ lovin’, but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an’ grubby ‘and–
Law! wot do they understand?
I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay . . .
Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there ain’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin’, and it’s there that I would be–
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
O the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin’-fishes play,
An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay!
And yes, as every 5th grader likes to point out, across the Bay from Moulmein is India, not China.
Kipling’s influence on children’s literature was widespread and significant, and many of us early in childhood enjoyed the stories and poems he wrote in the “Jungle Books” and “Just So Stories” . . . works created in his Vermont study. I especially liked “The Cat That Walked by Himself.”
Pussy can sit by the fire and sing,
Pussy can climb a tree,
Or play with a silly old cork and string
To ‘muse herself, not me.
But I like Binkie my dog, because
He knows how to behave;
So, Binkie’s the same as the First Friend was,
And I am the Man in the Cave!
Pussy will play Man-Friday till
It’s time to wet her paw
And make her walk on the window-sill
(For the footprint Crusoe saw)
Then she fluffles her tail and mews,
And scratches and won’t attend.
But Binkie will play whatever I choose,
And he is my true First Friend!
Pussy will rub my knees with her head
Pretending she loves me hard;
But the very minute I go to my bed
Pussy runs out in the yard,
And there she stays till the morning-light;
So I know it is only pretend;
But Binkie, he snores at my feet all night,
And he is my Firstest Friend!
Kipling would have remained in Vermont indefinitely had it not been for a dispute with his wife’s brother who lived nearby. It ended up in court, and the bad blood was sufficient to persuade Kipling to move back to England. He lived there until his death in 1936, but his popularity waned as people increasingly saw his imperialistic writing as racist. The charge is true, I’m afraid, but oh, the joy his poems and stories have given to so many.
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Sidebar. In 1889, prior to his Vermont experience and in his role as a journalist, Kipling travelled to America and made a pilgrimage to Elmira, New York (my hometown), where, unexpected and unannounced, he knocked on the door at Mark Twain’s summer home. The two writers, though of quite different age, took to each other immediately, and there, over multiple cigars, began a friendship that led Twain to say, “Between us we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest.” In 1907, Oxford University bestowed honorary doctorates on both Twain and Kipling, and they walked side-by-side at the head of the ceremonial procession.
Incidentally, also in the elite company to be honored with degrees were two chaps from France: Auguste Rodin and Camille Saint-Saëns. Heady stuff.
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VIDEO. In a concert setting, the members of the First Poetry Quartet present five of Kipling’s most famous poems, including “Gunga Din.”
Two notes:
- For those of you with Yale connections, you may get a whiff or two of “The Whiffenpoof Song.”
- This column most decidedly does not endorse the conclusion of the poem about cigars and marriage.
CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR VIDEO: RUDYARD KIPLING