Skip to main content

Nineveh and Tyre Part I

 


Rudyard Kipling, in his poem Recessional (1897) famously prophesied a time in which the British Empire would be no more, hard though this may have been to imagine in 1897, the diamond anniversary of the reign of Victoria. 

The poem consists of five stanzas of six lines each, and each stanza has a straightforward ABABCC rhyme scheme. The third sticks to my mind right now. 

Far-called, our navies melt away;
  On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Of course, the British Empire did in fact melt away, under the pressure of two world wars in the first half of the following century and then of the sweeping anti-imperial mood in the non-industrialized parts of the world that followed the end of the second of them.

Fortunately, as it melted away it was replaced in near-hegemony by a more-or-less friendly successor power where people spoke the same language, so its fate was not the harsher one of the conquered seats of  defeated empires in days past, not that of Carthage, and its royal family did not have to go the way of the Romanovs.  And, (speaking of royals) we have seen with Elizabeth II's death and the coronation at long last of her son Charles, that the mother country of the old Empire can still put on the pomp of yesterday.

Why did Kipling write this? He was so often a flag-waver for the Empire, an enthusiast. The empire was not just presumed, Kipling generally presumed, also, that the best specimens of humanity in the various countries held by the Empire would themselves serve it. Why such a mournful poem about its eventual passing?  

Maybe just as a matter of craft. The Diamond Jubilee year was full of enthusiasm, boast, pomp. In that context, Kipling could hardly have made a dent by adding more of the same. He went against the flow. He stood in spirit behind the ears of the celebrants whispering "this is all mortal." 

I hope to say something more specific in a separate post, perhaps next week, about Kipling's invocation of those two Old Testament cities in that fourth line of the above stanza. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more