Rudyard Kipling: The White Man's Poet

This article first appeared in the National Vanguard (disbanded) in March 1984 and the author is unknown.

One hundred years ago, in Lahore — today the second city in independent Pakistan but then an administrative center in British India — a 17-year-old sub-editor, fresh out of school in England, worked very hard to get out each day’s edition of the Civil and Military Gazette. His name was Rudyard Kipling.

Every now and then the young sub-editor, with his editor’s assent, would fill up a little left-over space in the newspaper with a poem of his own composition, much to the annoyance of the Indian typesetters, who did not like to use the special typefaces which Kipling deemed appropriate to distinguish his poems from the prose around them. In 1886 he gathered up all of these poems from the previous three years and republished them in a book, under the title Departmental Ditties. The book was an immediate hit with other British colonials, and the first printing sold out very quickly.

Then it was one book after another, for from 1883 until his death in 1936 Kipling’s pen was seldom idle; hardly a week went by that he did not write one or more poems. Because his poetry expressed so well the common sentiment of the race — the deep soul-sense of men conscious of their breeding and of their responsibility to live up to a standard set by their forebears — it became very popular with his fellows. He was by far the most widely read — and the best-loved — poet writing in English at the beginning of this century; every cultured person in the English-speaking world was familiar with at least some of his poems. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Kipling chose as his symbol — his personal rune — the swastika, the ancient Aryan sign of the sun and of health and of good fortune. Most editions of his works published in the first decades of this century are adorned with this symbol. Beginning in 1933, however, Jewish pressure was brought to bear against the publishers, and the swastikas were dropped from subsequent printings. [Image: Kim, (1901).]

Unfortunately, the censorship did not end there. Kipling’s poetry was obnoxious to the new men who began tightening their grip on the cultural and informational media of the English-speaking world in the 1930’s — obnoxious and dangerous. Actually, the whole spirit of Kipling’s writing was dangerous to them, totally at odds with the new spirit they were promoting so assiduously, but they could not simply ban all further publication of his works.

What they did instead was take measures to have dropped from new editions of his collected writings those of his poems and stories which expressed most explicitly the spirit and the ideas they feared: the spirit and the ideas of proud, free White men. Today every school child still reads a bit of Kipling’s poetry: such things as “Mandalay” and “FuzzyWuzzy” and “Gunga Din,” which superficially seem safely in tune with an age of multiracialism and “affirmative action” and White guilt.

But what schoolchild has ever been given an opportunity to read Kipling’s “The Children’s Song”? The first two stanzas of that poem are:

Land of our Birth, we pledge to thee
Our love and toil in the years to be;
When we are grown and take our place,
As men and women with our race.

Father in Heaven who lovest all,
Oh help Thy children when they call;
That they may build from age to age,
An undefiled heritage.

There are many other Kipling poems which have been deleted from every edition of his works published since the Second World War. Here are two of them:

A Song of the White Men

Now, this is the cup the White Men drink
When they go to right a wrong,
And that is the cup of the old world’s hate –
Cruel and strained and strong.
We have drunk that cup — and a bitter, bitter cup
And tossed the dregs away.
But well for the world when the White Men drink
To the dawn of the White Man’s day!

Now, this is the road that the White Men tread
When they go to clean a land –
Iron underfoot and levin overhead
And the deep on either hand.

We have trod that road — and a wet and windy road
Our chosen star for guide.
Oh, well for the world when the White Men tread
Their highway side by side!

Now, this is the faith that the White Men hold
When they build their homes afar –
“Freedom for ourselves and freedom for our sons
And, failing freedom, War. ”
We have proved our faith — bear witness to our faith,
Dear souls of freemen slain!
Oh, well for the world when the White Men join
To prove their faith again!

The Stranger

The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk –
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wonted to.
They are used to the lies I tell,
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy and sell.

The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.

The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

This was my father’s belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf –
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children’s teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.