War poems
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The White Man's Burden
© Rudyard Kipling
Take up the White man's burden --
Send forth the best ye breed --
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
The Wild Knight
© Gilbert Keith Chesterton
_A dark manor-house shuttered and unlighted, outlined against a pale
sunset: in front a large, but neglected, garden. To the right, in the
foreground, the porch of a chapel, with coloured windows lighted. Hymns
within._
The Bloody Sun
© Algernon Charles Swinburne
O WHERE have ye been the morn sae late,
My merry son, come tell me hither?
O where have ye been the morn sae late?
And I wot I hae but anither.
By the water-gate, by the water-gate,
O dear mither.
Two Months
© Rudyard Kipling
June
No hope, no change! The clouds have shut us in,
And through the cloud the sullen Sun strikes down
Full on the bosom of the tortured Town,
Lines To Fanny
© John Keats
What can I do to drive away
Remembrance from my eyes? for they have seen,
Aye, an hour ago, my brilliant Queen!
Touch has a memory. O say, love, say,
To the Unknown Goddess
© Rudyard Kipling
Will you conquer my heart with your beauty; my sould going out from afar?
Shall I fall to your hand as a victim of crafty and cautions shikar?Have I met you and passed you already, unknowing, unthinking and blind?
Shall I meet you next session at Simla, O sweetest and best of your kind?Does the P. and O. bear you to meward, or, clad in short frocks in the West,
Are you growing the charms that shall capture and torture the heart in my breast?Will you stay in the Plains till September -- my passion as warm as the day?
The Truce of the Bear
© Rudyard Kipling
Yearly, with tent and rifle, our careless white men go
By the Pass called Muttianee, to shoot in the vale below.
Yearly by Muttianee he follows our white men in --
Matun, the old blind beggar, bandaged from brow to chin.
The Mine-Sweepers
© Rudyard Kipling
Dawn off the Foreland-the young flood making
Jumbled and short and steep-
Pretty Cow
© Jane Taylor
Thank you, pretty cow, that made
Pleasant milk to soak my bread
Every day and every night,
Warm, and fresh, and sweet, and white.
A British PHILIPPIC
© Mark Akenside
Occasion'd by the Insults of the Spaniards, and the present Preparations for War, 1738.
To C. Lloyd, On His Proposing To Domesticate With The Author
© Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A mount, not wearisome and bare and steep,
But a green mountain variously up-piled
Where o'er the jutting rocks soft mosses creep
Or colored lichens with slow oozing weep;
The Domestic Affections
© Felicia Dorothea Hemans
Favor'd of Heav'n! O Genius! are they thine,
When round thy brow the wreaths of glory shine;
While rapture gazes on thy radiant way,
'Midst the bright realms of clear and mental day?
The Sons of Martha
© Rudyard Kipling
The Sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part;
But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the careful soul and the troubled heart.
And because she lost her temper once, and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest,
Her Sons must wait upon Mary's Sons, world without end, reprieve, or rest.
The Songs of the Lathes
© Rudyard Kipling
1918Being the Words of the Tune Hummed at Her Lathe by Mrs. L. Embsay, Widow
The fans and the beltings they roar round me.
The power is shaking the floor round me
Till the lathes pick up their duty and the midnight-shift takes over.
It is good for me to be here!
The Song of Seven Cities
© Rudyard Kipling
I was Lord of Cities very sumptuously builded.
Seven roaring Cities paid me tribute from far.
Ivory their outposts were--the guardrooms of them gilded,
And garrisoned with Amazons invincible in war.
Song of the Red War-Boat
© Rudyard Kipling
For we hold that in all disaster
Of shipwreck, storm, or sword,
A Man must stand by his Master
When once he has pledged his word.
The Song of the Dead
© Rudyard Kipling
Hear now the Song of the Dead -- in the North by the torn berg-edges --
They that look still to the Pole, asleep by their hide-stripped sledges.
Song of the Dead in the South -- in the sun by their skeleton horses,
Where the warrigal whimpers and bays through the dust of the sere river-courses.
