Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Friday, I shared some thoughts about Rudyard Kipling's poem RECESSIONAL.  I quoted especially this verse: 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! Today I would like to talk briefly about the two Biblical references, Nineveh and Tyre.  Nineveh figures in the story of Jonah. Jonah was ordered to deliver God's wrathful message of impending destruction to Nineveh, a city near the one we know as Mosul.  Jonah is reluctant to do his duty, and in the course of his flight he is swallowed whole by a large sea creature.  Everybody remembers that bit. What they might not remember is that eventually Jonah gets to Nineveh.  He cries out that in forty days God will destroy the city.  But Nineveh reforms its ways. God sees this and relents. Nineveh is not destroyed. The biblical resonance of ...

  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 ...