KIPLING AND THE POETRY OF WORK

C.S. Lewis's description of Kipling as ‘first and foremost the poet of work’ clearly fits the monologue-poem ‘McAndrew's Hymn’ whose speaker finds the meaning of human existence in the working of his steam-engine – ‘From coupler-flange to spindlehead I see Thy hand, O God / Predestination in the stride of yon connectin’ – rod” (W, 120) and the tribute in ‘The Sons of Martha’, to the unsung heroes whose skill and endurance allow their fortunate fellows to take railways and electricity for granted: ‘They finger death at their gloves’ end where they piece and re-piece the living wires./ He rears against the gates they tend; they feed him hungry behind their fires’ (W, 382). But Kipling's most far-reaching and nuanced exploration of man's destiny of labour and endurance is to be found principally in his prose fiction. In this chapter I examine the work ethic dramatized in two fictions: the novella Captains Courageous (1896), and the bleaker fable ‘The Bridge Builders’ (DW, 1898), which counterpoises confident English technological supremacy against the numinous, archaic world of Indian gods, in the context of other stories and poems dealing with this theme.

Kipling is fascinated, first of all, by manual skills of all kinds. Randall Jarrell wrote that ‘if Kipling had written instructions on how to make a bed with hospital corners, or how to can gooseberries, I could read them with pleasure: as one of his characters says, “It was the tone, man, the tone!”’, a readerly fantasy which is plausible because Kipling's writing is so full of mundane tasks carried out with skill and despatch. When two Sussex woodmen deal with an overgrown hedge, ‘Jabez ranged up and down till he found a thinner place, and with clean snicks of the handbill revealed the original face of the fence. Jesse took over the dripping stuff as it fell forward, and, with a grasp and a kick, made it to lie orderly on the bank till it should be faggotted’(‘Friendly Brook’, D of C, 46).