The film begins at 8:00, however!
Kipling was a great man, in his rather muddled way. (For example, Cecil Rhodes certainly had some good qualities, but one could go way overboard with admiration ...)
It’s been many years since I read those books. Will have to check my library!
While certainly he supported the British Empire (or at least the folks who were out on the front lines trying to support the Empire), he was not the jingoistic cheerleader for Imperialism that the liberal cartoonists and writers of the time claimed. He perfectly understood the dark side of authority and the dangers of power . . . and many of his short stories and poems point that out in crystal clear fashion. But he also understood that the alternative to Law was Anarchy and all the horrors that that brought with it.
His late stories are incredibly layered and full of elliptical references and private jokes. They are difficult, but worth teasing the meaning out of.
The Puck stories are much more straightforward and in spots achingly beautiful . . .
The Way Through the Woods
THEY shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again;
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate.
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few)
You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods . . .
But there is no road through the woods.
You should recognize Rene as René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laënnec, inventor of the stethoscope.