Posted on 01/29/2010 9:19:53 PM PST by bruinbirdman
Bah. Here’s a note to the overly sensitive…
Read ‘White Man’s Burden.’ Yeah, yeah, racist, racist. Whatever.
Fine. Replace the words ‘white man’ with ‘First World’ or ‘republic’ or ‘empire’.
Now, look around the world, and tell me where that poem reads false.
“crickets”
I wouldn't say pandering to it...more like reluctantly giving in to it.
It's brilliant and one of my favorites. Kipling was going through a great deal of suffering at the time he wrote it.
About Gods of the Copybook Headings
Published in October 1919 when the poet was 53 years old, "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" has proved enduringly popular, despite the fact that copybooks disappeared from schoolrooms in Britain and America during, or shortly after, World War 2. A copybook was an exercise book used to practice one's handwriting in. The pages were blank except for horizontal rulings and a printed specimen of perfect handwriting at the top. You were supposed to copy this specimen all down the page. The specimens were proverbs or quotations, or little commonplace hortatory or admonitory sayings—the ones in the poem illustrate the kind of thing. These were the copybook headings.
Kipling had lost his dearly loved son in World War 1, and a precious daughter some years earlier. He was a drained man in 1919, and England, with which he identified intensely, was a drained nation.
I’ve always known it as “Custis-Lee Mansion”.
To be fair to some of Rudyard Kipling’s critics, it’s sometimes hard to tell his condescension from his irony.
The saddest thing of all is that Kipling is not a bad author! He doesn’t disparage India or Indian heritage at all. Look at his beloved Jungle Book. And “White Man’s Burden”, is a very melancholy piece. I know academia loves to take potshots at the work as an unmitigated jingoistic work, but that’s hardly the case.
“Take up the White Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
“Why brought he from our bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?”
He calls out this bullshit, no doubt he’d find it humorous how India ‘remembers’ him.
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