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Unit 8: Before a Midnight Breaks in Storm by Rudyard Kipling

have read Kipling’s fifty or seventy-five best stories you realize that few men have written this Notes
many stories of this much merit, and that very few have written more and better stories.”
His children’s stories remain popular; and his Jungle Books have been made into several movies.
The first was made by producerAlexander Korda, and other films have been produced by the Walt
Disney Company. A number of his poems were set to music by Percy Grainger. A series of short
films based on some of his stories was broadcast by the BBC in 1964. Kipling’s work is still
popular today.
The poet T.S. Eliot edited A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1941) with an introductory essay. Eliot is
aware of the complaints that had been levelled against Kipling: and he dismissed them one by
one: that Kipling is ‘a Tory’ using his verse to transmit right wing political views, or ‘a journalist’
pandering to popular taste; while Eliot writes “I cannot find any justification for the charge that
he held a doctrine of race superiority.” Eliot finds instead.
An immense gift for using words, an amazing curiosity and power of observation with his mind
and with all his senses, the mask of the entertainer, and beyond that a queer gift of second sight,
of transmitting messages from elsewhere, a gift so disconcerting when we are made aware of it
that thenceforth we are never sure when it is not present: all this makes Kipling a writer
impossible wholly to understand and quite impossible to belittle.
—T.S. Eliot

Of Kipling’s verse, such as his Barrack-Room Ballads, Eliot writes “of a number of poets who
have written great poetry, only ... a very few whom I should call great verse writers. And unless
I am mistaken, Kipling’s position in this class is not only high, but unique.”

The poet Alison Brackenbury writes that “Kipling is poetry’s Dickens, an outsider and journalist
with an unrivalled ear for sound and speech.”
Kipling is often quoted in discussions of contemporary political and social issues. Political
singer-songwriter Billy Bragg, who attempts to reclaim English nationalism from the right-
wing, has reclaimed Kipling for an inclusive sense of Englishness. Kipling’s enduring relevance
has been noted in the United States as it has become involved in Afghanistan and other areas
about which he wrote.

8.1.9 Links with Scouting

Kipling’s links with the Scouting movements were strong. Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-
Powell, the founder of Scouting, used many themes from The Jungle Book stories and Kim in
setting up his junior movement, the Wolf Cubs. These connections still exist today, such as the
continued popularity of ”Kim’s Game” in the Scouting movement. The movement is named
after Mowgli’s adopted wolf family, and the adult helpers of Wolf Cub Packs adopt names taken
from The Jungle Book, especially the adult leader who is called Akela after the leader of the
Seeonee wolf pack.

8.1.10 Kipling’s Home at Burwash

After the death of Kipling’s wife in 1939, his house, “Bateman’s” in Burwash, East Sussex, South
East England, where he had lived from 1902 until 1936, was bequeathed to the National Trust for
Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty and is now a public museum dedicated to the
author. Elsie, his only child who lived to maturity, died childless in 1976, and bequeathed her
copyrights to the National Trust.
Novelist and poet Sir Kingsley Amis wrote a poem, ‘Kipling at Bateman’s’, after visiting Kipling’s
Burwash home (Amis’ father had lived in Burwash briefly in the 1960s). Amis and a BBC television
crew went to make a short film in a series of films about writers and their houses.

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