Page 155 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Elective English—IV

Notes So soon as Fate hath wings.
These shall possess
Our littleness,
And in the imperial task (as worthy) lay
Up our lives’ all to piece one giant Day.

Task Recite the poem Before a Midnight breaks in storm by Rudyard Kipling.

8.2.1 Analysis

Before a midnight breaks in storm written by Stephen Leacock was first published as the Dedication
to The Five Nation(1903).
Background

The poem sounds an apocalyptic note, warning against the danger that comes when the signs of
impending disaster are ignored. Kipling was frustrated by the failure of those in power to
register the threat from Germany, whose military and imperial ambitions were evident to him.
The language is exceptionally enigmatic and condensed, suggesting that Kipling’s private
anxieties concerning unforeseen attack underlie and give resonance to the talk of a more public
threat.
[Stanza 3] Even crystal-gazers, those who try to foretell the future, can fail to ask themselves the
right questions. The stanza appears to refer to the sequence of changes, through mistiness to
blackness and emptiness which may appear to take place in the crystal ball as it is gazed into
with a view to predicting the future. Kipling associated spiritualism and its attendant practices
with deep suspicion, feeling that her involvement in them had contributed to the mental illness
of his sister, Trix, who owned and used one of these balls herself. Yet Kipling shared his sister’s
sensitivity and admitted that unsought experience of ‘the Sight’ had come to him.
[Stanza 4] In a language that is compacted and obscure Kipling appears to be prophesying: he
foresees a future to be compared with the end of the world, an end to be brought about by
the destructiveness of the Gods themselves. For ‘sport-making gods’ of Shakespeare’s King
Lear IV ii:

As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods
They kill us for their sport.
The failure of the ‘all-pregnant sphere’ to deliver its message perhaps refers again to the crystal
ball and the difficulty of reading what it shows.

[Stanza 5] Among the compressed and difficult language can be made out a possible reference to
the airmen – ’winged men’ – whose crucial part in future warfare Kipling foresaw. Yet the
notion that ’our lives’ all will be taken to make up the huge total that is required for the giant
day to come seems like a glimpse of a catastrophe that is personal, one that would arrive for
Kipling in 1915 with the death of his son John at the front.

!
Caution You must remember that it was at the end of 1903, the year in which this collection
was published that the Wright brothers achieved their first powered flights.

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