Down by the Salley Gardens

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;

She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.

She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;

But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,

And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.

She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;

But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

RUDYARD KIPLING

The exotic and far-away India first shaped young Rudyard's outlook, and the touch of Indian tales and poems, learnt from the Hindu servants, would ever be felt both in his poetry and prose.

At age six, Rudyard Kipling (Dec. 30, 1865, Bombay, India — Jan. 18, 1936, London, England) was to leave his Indian home for England to get an education. His first six years in England, in a strict Calvinistic foster home, were very unhappy. He was treated with such cruelty that his parents finally removed him to a private school at age 12. His personal views were lagely shaped by the English school code of honour and loyalty. At age 17, he went to his parents in India, where his father was teaching sculpture at the Bombay Art School, and started his first job as a newspaper reporter. Simultaneously, he worked as a part-time writer, and published his Departmental Ditties, a small book of poetry, in 1886. But the next year made him famous with his Plain Tales from the Hills (1888). These volumes laid out the main direction of his career. The first tells of impressions and happenings of life in the Colonial Army, the second consists of short stories about Indian life. Between 1887 and 1889 he published six volumes of short stories, among them Soldiers Three, The Phantom Rickshaw, and Wee Willie Winkie.

In 1892, Kipling married Caroline Balestier, the sister of an American publisher and writer with whom he had once collaborated. The couple moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, USA, but because of a bitter quarrel with his wife's parents, the Kiplings had to leave for England and never travelled to the USA again.

At the end of the 19^th century, India was rated as one of the most important colonies of the British Empire, and people took great interest in that exotic part of the world. The seven years Kipling spent there in the 1880s added much to his experience and found reflection in his stories and poems. The Jungle Books (1894) tell the legendary story of Mowgli and jungle animals. Other volumes of short stories are: Soldiers Three (1889), Life's Handicap (1890), Many Inventions (1893), The Days Work (1898), and Actions and Reactions (1909). In Kim (1901), one of his long narratives, Kipling tries to understand and sympathetically describe the Indians' way of life, as he also does in his other novels — The Light That Failed (1891), Captain Courageous (1897).

Kipling's best works had been written by the turn of the century. Afterwards he still wrote poetry and prose, the most popular of which were the songs in Puck of Pook's Hill (1906), glorifying the English past. He was the first English man of letters to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1907.

As a poet, Kipling also wrote with the Indian culture in the background, as seen through the eyes of soldiers. And though he is often referred to as the poet of British imperialism, in his soldier verse there is more human sympathy than victorious celebrations. His Barrack-Room Ballads (1890) gained him an enormous popularity not only for fresh themes but also for his masterful handling of verse rhythms. Other popular collections of Kipling's poetry include The Seven Seas (1896), The Five Nations (1903), and The Years Between (1918), and the final edition of his Collected Verse (1933).

If

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream — and not make dreams your master;

If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with triumph and disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 912