MODULE 2.BRITISH LITERATURE

RUDYARD KIPLING
POSTED: JOHN REY QUITARA TALISAYSAY

SOURCES:  http://www.answers.com/topic/rudyard-kipling#ixzz1FcwLSmsi
                      http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/if.html

• Born: 30 December 1865
• Birthplace: Bombay, India
• Died: 18 January 1936
• Best Known As: The author of The Jungle Book

Rudyard Kipling is the author of The Jungle Book and other British-flavored tales of the Indian subcontinent. Kipling was born in India to British parents, but spent much of his childhood at school in England before returning to India in his teens. His collection Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) was full of colorful, dusty, sing-song poems told from the point of view of the common British soldier, including the popular poem "Gunga Din." The Jungle Book (1894) was a collection of fictional stories about the wilds of India, many of them about Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves. It was followed by The Second Jungle Book in 1895 and was the basis for the popular 1967 Disney animated film. At the time Kipling began writing, Queen Victoria still held the title of "Empress of India," and Kipling is known as a romantic imperialist: sympathetic toward the British Empire's foreign subjects and yet proud of the British role in keeping and expanding its empire. Kipling traveled widely and wrote hundreds of essays, poems and stories, continuing to write nearly up to his death in 1936. Among his most popular poems are If ("IF you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you..."), Mandalay ("... An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!"). His 1897 book Captains Courageous was set among the fishing fleets of New England, and Kim (1901) in the Himalayas. Just So Stories (1902) was a collection of whimsical African tales, including "How the Leopard Got His Spots" and "The Elephant's Child." His son John was killed while fighting in World War I, and after the war Kipling published a history of John's regiment, titled The Irish Guards in the Great War (1923). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.
The poem "Gunga Din" includes the famous final line, "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!" The poem was expanded into a 1939 feature film, with Cary Grant as a British soldier and Sam Jaffe as Gunga Din... Kipling's 1899 poem The White Man's Burden was the first public use of that phrase... Kipling's two Jungle Book volumes are often published together under the plural title The Jungle Books... Another well-travelled adventure author of Kipling's era was Scotland's Robert Louis Stevenson.

Recessional

                                          Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it

The Gift of the Sea

The dead child lay in the shroud,
                        And the widow watched beside;
                     And her mother slept, and the Channel swept
                      The gale in the teeth of the tide.
 
                         But the mother laughed at all.
                      "I have lost my man in the sea,
                      And the child is dead.  Be still," she said,
                          "What more can ye do to me?"
 
                       The widow watched the dead,
                          And the candle guttered low,
                      And she tried to sing the Passing Song
                           That bids the poor soul go.
  
                    And "Mary take you now," she sang,
                         "That lay against my heart."
                      And "Mary smooth your crib to-night,"
                         But she could not say "Depart."
 
                     Then came a cry from the sea,
                   But the sea-rime blinded the glass,
                  And "Heard ye nothing, mother?" she said,
                     "'Tis the child that waits to pass."
 
                   And the nodding mother sighed:
                  "'Tis a lambing ewe in the whin,
                For why should the christened soul cry out
                   That never knew of sin?"
         
                   "O feet I have held in my hand,
                   O hands at my heart to catch,
                    How should they know the road to go,
                     And how should they lift the latch?"
 
                    They laid a sheet to the door,
                      With the little quilt atop,
               That it might not hurt from the cold or the dirt,
                      But the crying would not stop.
   
                       The widow lifted the latch
                      And strained her eyes to see,
                 And opened the door on the bitter shore
                    To let the soul go free.
 

                                         There was neither glimmer nor ghost,
                                               There was neither spirit nor spark,
                                        And "Heard ye nothing, mother?" she said,
                                                  "'Tis crying for me in the dark."

                                            And the nodding mother sighed:
                                               "'Tis sorrow makes ye dull;
                                           Have ye yet to learn the cry of the tern,
                                             Or the wail of the wind-blown gull?"

                                               "The terns are blown inland,
                                                The grey gull follows the plough.
                                                'Twas never a bird, the voice I heard,
                                                  O mother, I hear it now!"

                                                   "Lie still, dear lamb, lie still;
                                                  The child is passed from harm,
                                          'Tis the ache in your breast that broke your rest,
                                                  And the feel of an empty arm."

                                                         She put her mother aside,
                                                             "In Mary's name let be!
                                                    For the peace of my soul I must go," she said,
                                                            And she went to the calling sea.

                                                        In the heel of the wind-bit pier,
                                                     Where the twisted weed was piled,
                                               She came to the life she had missed by an hour,
                                                            For she came to a little child.

                                                       She laid it into her breast,
                                                     And back to her mother she came,

Though she gave it her own child's name.
 
                      And the dead child dripped on her breast,
                         And her own in the shroud lay stark;
                        And "God forgive us, mother," she said,
                          "We let it die in the dark!"