lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

"THENINETIES"age of Imperial Democracy, of the temper which precipitatedthe Boer War and the oratory of the newschool of Joseph Chamberlain and Lloyd George, mighthave found a suitable candidate in Rudyard Kipling.Barrack Room Ballads (1892) was for a wide circle ofreaders a much more startling eruption than anyvolume of poems since the Poems and Ballads ofSwinburne. But if Kipling's readers and admirersincluded many who were familiar with the oldervolume, and recognised its influence in the new, thecircle of his admirers was a far wider one. Kipling'snew moods and measures went round the world withthe tap of the British drum. But he was a child ofhis so different ancestors. He had, in fact, by birthand education, a close link with the Pre-Raphaelites.One of his short stories tells of a drunk soldier orcivilian (I forget which) in India who excites the sympathyand interest of the narrator by muttering in hisslumber the cadences of The Song of the Bower:Say, is it day, is it dusk in thy bower,Thou whom I long for, who longest for me ?and it was evident to any careful reader that the newpoet was not insensible to the music of Rossetti andSwinburne. But Kipling was also a journalist, andthe audiences he wished to make appeal to were morefamiliar with the strains of the music halls than thoseof Dolores and The Triumph of Time. It was hispeculiar task to blend the popular with the moresophisticated, and thus his favourite measures arevariations on the ballad seven and other simple rhythms,but the rush of the anapaests and the hammer of thetrochees would not have been quite what they are ifSwinburne had not led the way. There is no imitation135