but we will remember the name of 1 898. In its revised form the poem reacts to resis
the Lord our God.' tance in the Philippines to the United States'
1. This poem was conceived for Queen Victoria's assumption of colonial power.
.
1822 / RUDYARD KIPLING
25 Take up the White Man's burden? No tawdry rule of kings, But toil of serf and sweeper2? The tale of common things. The ports ye shall not enter, 30 The roads ye shall not tread, Go make them with your living, And mark them with your dead. Take up the White Man's burden? And reap his old reward: 35 The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard? The cry of hosts ye humour (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:? 'Why brought ye us from bondage, 40 Our loved Egyptian night?'3 Take up the White Man's burden? Ye dare not stoop to less? Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloak your weariness; 45 By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen peoples Shall weigh your Gods and you. Take up the White Man's burden? 50 Have done with childish days? The lightly proffered laurel,4 The easy, ungrudged praise. Comes now, to search your manhood Through all the thankless years, 55 Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers! 1899
If?
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; 5 If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
2. Street sweeper, who in India would belong to slavery. the lowest caste. 4. A symbol of military distinction in the triumphs
3. Cf. Exodus 16.2?3. When the Israelites were celebrated by victorious Roman generals (later, suffering from hunger in the wilderness, they crit-Roman emperors wore a laurel crown as part of
icized Moses and Aaron for taking them from what their official regalia).
they saw as the relative comfort of Egyptian
.
ERNEST DOWSON / 1823
Or being hated don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream?and not make dreams your master; 10
If you can think?and not make thoughts your aim, If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, 15 Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,1 And lose, and start again at your beginnings 20 And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
25 If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings?nor? lose the common touch, and not If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute 30 With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, And?which is more?you'll be a Man, my son!
1910
1. A game, played with coins, that combines skill (tossing a coin as close as possible to a fixed mark) and luck (flipping coins and keeping those that come up heads).
ERNEST DOWSON 1867-1900
Ernest Christopher Dowson spent much of his childhood traveling with his father on the Continent, mostly in France. His education was thus irregular and informal, but he acquired a thorough knowledge of French and of his favorite French writers? Gustave Flaubert, Honore de Balzac, and Paul Verlaine?and a good knowledge of Latin poetry, especially Catullus, Propertius, and Horace. Dowson went to Oxford in 1886, but he did not take to regular academic instruction and left after a year. Though nominally assisting his father to manage a dock in the London district of Limehouse, Dowson spent most of his time writing poetry, stories, and essays and talking with Lionel Johnson, W. B. Yeats, and other members of the Rhymers' Club, in which he played a prominent part. Between 1890 and 1894 Dowson, though leading the irregular life of so many of the nineties poets, produced his best work, and his volume Verses came out in 1896. Late nights and excessive drinking impaired a constitution already threatened by tuberculosis. He moved to France in 1894, making a living by
.
1824 / ERNEST DOWSON
translating from the French for an English publisher though his health was steadily worsening. After his return to England, he was discovered near death by a friend, who took the poet to his home and nursed Dowson until he died six weeks later.
Dowson was a member of what Yeats called 'the tragic generation' of poets in the nineties who seemed to be driven by their own restless energies to dissipation and premature death. As a poet he was considerably influenced by Algernon Charles Swinburne (whose feverish emotional tone he often captures very skillfully). Dowson experimented with a variety of meters, and in 'Cynara' (1891) he used the twelve- syllable alexandrine as the normal line of a six-line stanza in a manner more common in French than in English poetry. He was also especially interested in the work of the French symbolist poets and in their theories of verbal suggestiveness and of poetry as incantation: he believed (as he once wrote in a letter) that a finer poetry could sometimes be achieved by 'mere sound and music, with just a suggestion of sense.'
Cynara
Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae'
Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
