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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. 

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