Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads
by Rudyard Kipling 
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57 poems ranging from the exuberant 'Mandalay' to the dark 'Danny Deever'Tags
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Some of Kipling’s most stirring – if Imperial – verse are in this edition that shows how closely he could get alongside of the troopers and solders of Queen Victoria’s “little wars”, encapsulating their speech, manners, courage and concerns.
The first verse of his ”Departmental Ditties” outlines Kipling’s constant, and rarely disputed, claim to be close enough to his subject to reflect its truth.
”I have eaten your bread and salt, I have drunk your water and wine, The deaths ye died I have watched beside, And the lives that ye lived were mine.”
He really did “live those lives”, spending years in the North West Frontier and Army camps of India, firstly as a child then as a journalist and author. Many of these show more classic Kipling pieces were written during his career as a newspaper editor, as columns for the paper and were written after his trips and visits to the troops and Indian Government ‘stations’.
This edition has the gold-standard classics for which Kipling may best be known –(“on the road to”) Mandalay, The Widow at Windsor, Gunga Din, and his Ballads of East and West and Arithmetic on the Frontier, that is one of my personal favorites.
”A scrimmage in a Border Station – A canter down some dark defile –Two thousand pounds of education Drops to a ten-rupee jezail—The Crammer’s boast, the Squadrons pride, Shot like a rabbit in a ride!”
Also included is the most controversial, the oft derided Fuzzy Wuzzy, considered now to be no more than a racist rant. Ironically, the only person I ever met who knew it by heart was an Ethiopian surgeon friend who assured me that it was popularly understood to be complimentary by those same ‘fuzzies’ of his country. Any reading confirms this, if you have a basis of the English vernacular, the lines makes clear the British soldier’s admiration …
”Then ’ere’s to you, Fuzzy Wuzzy, the missus and the kids” and expresses the incredulous bravery of spears against Martini-Henrys and records that fact that these primitive warriors were the ONLY troops to have ever broken a British square.
I think that browsing through Kipling’s verses as he recounts the real life of “Tommy”, his officers and the period of which he writes makes very enjoyable reading, and gives a very deep historical insight into the peoples of the Raj through the rather neglected medium of verse. I can recommend this book even to those who dislike (or think they dislike) poetry. show less
The first verse of his ”Departmental Ditties” outlines Kipling’s constant, and rarely disputed, claim to be close enough to his subject to reflect its truth.
”I have eaten your bread and salt, I have drunk your water and wine, The deaths ye died I have watched beside, And the lives that ye lived were mine.”
He really did “live those lives”, spending years in the North West Frontier and Army camps of India, firstly as a child then as a journalist and author. Many of these show more classic Kipling pieces were written during his career as a newspaper editor, as columns for the paper and were written after his trips and visits to the troops and Indian Government ‘stations’.
This edition has the gold-standard classics for which Kipling may best be known –(“on the road to”) Mandalay, The Widow at Windsor, Gunga Din, and his Ballads of East and West and Arithmetic on the Frontier, that is one of my personal favorites.
”A scrimmage in a Border Station – A canter down some dark defile –Two thousand pounds of education Drops to a ten-rupee jezail—The Crammer’s boast, the Squadrons pride, Shot like a rabbit in a ride!”
Also included is the most controversial, the oft derided Fuzzy Wuzzy, considered now to be no more than a racist rant. Ironically, the only person I ever met who knew it by heart was an Ethiopian surgeon friend who assured me that it was popularly understood to be complimentary by those same ‘fuzzies’ of his country. Any reading confirms this, if you have a basis of the English vernacular, the lines makes clear the British soldier’s admiration …
”Then ’ere’s to you, Fuzzy Wuzzy, the missus and the kids” and expresses the incredulous bravery of spears against Martini-Henrys and records that fact that these primitive warriors were the ONLY troops to have ever broken a British square.
I think that browsing through Kipling’s verses as he recounts the real life of “Tommy”, his officers and the period of which he writes makes very enjoyable reading, and gives a very deep historical insight into the peoples of the Raj through the rather neglected medium of verse. I can recommend this book even to those who dislike (or think they dislike) poetry. show less
Title page reads "Barrack Room Ballads and Departmental Ditties".
Also contains "Other Verses".
Also contains "Other Verses".
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Kipling, who as a novelist dramatized the ambivalence of the British colonial experience, was born of English parents in Bombay and as a child knew Hindustani better than English. He spent an unhappy period of exile from his parents (and the Indian heat) with a harsh aunt in England, followed by the public schooling that inspired his "Stalky" show more stories. He returned to India at 18 to work on the staff of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette and rapidly became a prolific writer. His mildly satirical work won him a reputation in England, and he returned there in 1889. Shortly after, his first novel, The Light That Failed (1890) was published, but it was not altogether successful. In the early 1890s, Kipling met and married Caroline Balestier and moved with her to her family's estate in Brattleboro, Vermont. While there he wrote Many Inventions (1893), The Jungle Book (1894-95), and Captains Courageous (1897). He became dissatisfied with life in America, however, and moved back to England, returning to America only when his daughter died of pneumonia. Kipling never again returned to the United States, despite his great popularity there. Short stories form the greater portion of Kipling's work and are of several distinct types. Some of his best are stories of the supernatural, the eerie and unearthly, such as "The Phantom Rickshaw," "The Brushwood Boy," and "They." His tales of gruesome horror include "The Mark of the Beast" and "The Return of Imray." "William the Conqueror" and "The Head of the District" are among his political tales of English rule in India. The "Soldiers Three" group deals with Kipling's three musketeers: an Irishman, a Cockney, and a Yorkshireman. The Anglo-Indian Tales, of social life in Simla, make up the larger part of his first four books. Kipling wrote equally well for children and adults. His best-known children's books are Just So Stories (1902), The Jungle Books (1894-95), and Kim (1901). His short stories, although their understanding of the Indian is often moving, became minor hymns to the glory of Queen Victoria's empire and the civil servants and soldiers who staffed her outposts. Kim, an Irish boy in India who becomes the companion of a Tibetan lama, at length joins the British Secret Service, without, says Wilson, any sense of the betrayal of his friend this actually meant. Nevertheless, Kipling has left a vivid panorama of the India of his day. In 1907, Kipling became England's first Nobel Prize winner in literature and the only nineteenth-century English poet to win the Prize. He won not only on the basis of his short stories, which more closely mirror the ambiguities of the declining Edwardian world than has commonly been recognized, but also on the basis of his tremendous ability as a popular poet. His reputation was first made with Barrack Room Ballads (1892), and in "Recessional" he captured a side of Queen Victoria's final jubilee that no one else dared to address. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Rudyard Kipling has a Legacy Library. Legacy libraries are the personal libraries of famous readers, entered by LibraryThing members from the Legacy Libraries group.
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- ISBNs
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- ASINs
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