Recessional and Other Poems
by Rudyard Kipling 
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Excerpt from Recessional and Other Poems Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget - lest we forget For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding calls not Thee to guard For frantic boast and foolish word. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books show more uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. show lessTags
Member Reviews
Ah, Rudyard Kipling. I'd forgotten how deeply misogynist you were, but "The Vampire" reminded me. It's a beautiful slim volume, and the second I've encountered recently bound in kidskin and with the title in gold leaf. This volume is in far better condition than my Holmes, but it will still (of course) be stored in the glass bookcase.
I will now have the music of the Recessional in my head for the next day or so.
God of our fathers, known of old --
Lord of our far-flung battle line --
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine --
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget -- lest we forget!
I love that old beast.
Here's my favorite Kipling:
The Himalayan peasant
Meets the He-Bear in his stride.
He will shout to scare the show more monster,
Who will often turn aside.
But the She-Bear thus accosted
Rends the peasant, tooth and nail!
For the female of the species
Is more deadly than the male.
Pity that one's not in here, but there's wealth enough.
(I note that there are other copies of this book, with the same title, but they seem to be a different book. I may separate them out, later.) show less
I will now have the music of the Recessional in my head for the next day or so.
God of our fathers, known of old --
Lord of our far-flung battle line --
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine --
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget -- lest we forget!
I love that old beast.
Here's my favorite Kipling:
The Himalayan peasant
Meets the He-Bear in his stride.
He will shout to scare the show more monster,
Who will often turn aside.
But the She-Bear thus accosted
Rends the peasant, tooth and nail!
For the female of the species
Is more deadly than the male.
Pity that one's not in here, but there's wealth enough.
(I note that there are other copies of this book, with the same title, but they seem to be a different book. I may separate them out, later.) show less
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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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