Joseph Rudyard Kipling

by

Joyce Hemsley

Series of famous British Names:

British Poet and Author
JOSEPH RUDYARD KIPLING
Born eighteen sixty-five, Bombay
Died nineteen thirty-six, England,
his ashes in Westminster Abbey.

Rudyard Kipling left India at the
age of six and was educated at
Westward Ho College, Devon.
Lyrics from his schooldays were
published; he then spent seven
years in India as a journalist,
and wrote many poems. Back in
England, he wrote The Light
Failed 1890, and Barrack Room
Ballads 1892. Caroline and
Rudyard Kipling married, and
spent four years in America where
he wrote two Jungle Books;
Captains Courageous 1897, and
so much more.

In England 1907 he was awarded
The Nobel Prize for Literature,
being the first Englishman to be
awarded such a high honour.
His most quoted works are:
The Ballad of East and West, Boots,
If, Gunga Din and Mandalay.

Although Kipling was a great
writer, he refused many honours
in his lifetime. And although
he was not a Laureate, many
regarded him as such. His son
was killed in the war, and in 1923
Kipling wrote "The Irish Guards
in The Great War"...later his
autobiography was published.

In a poetry anthology on my shelf
I have a copy of C.Day Lewis's
choice of poetry, and I quote
the first verse of The Way Through
The Woods ~ which is far from
Kipling's best work, but rather pretty:

"They shut the road through the woods
seventy years ago...
weather and rain have undone it again
and now you would never know,
there was once a path through the woods
before they planted the tree,
it is underneath the coppice and heath
and the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
that, where the ring-dove broods
and the badgers roll at ease.
There was once a road through the woods."
(the poem continues).

So this is it - a very brief survey
of the life and work of a great man
of the times (1865 - 1936).

NEXT?
Why don't you look at The Promise of Christmas
by: Wesley A. Storer
from: Spokane, WA, US

To visit all of Joyce Hemsley's poems, click HERE

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