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Few short literary works have caused such a sensation as did this poem on its publication in Diamons Jubilee year, 1897, or divided both academic and lay opinion as it has ever since. It redeems Kipling in the eyes of many, and even Orwell accepted it as "a denunciation of power politics". Yet some of Kipling's admirers wish he had not repented of his original view of the piece (he threw away t...

Stunning in its use of metaphor (the "widow's party" being a Victorian soldier's byword for a bloody campaign) this piece, like "Soldier, soldier" is self-evidently more song than poem. The "Johnnie..." refrains are genuinely difficult to read in plain speech. Note also the sardonic last stanza: so much again for Kipling as blind imperialist...

Any who doubt that Kipling sometimes wrote songs in themselves, rather than poems capable of musical setting, should study this piece: a ballad in the musical as well as the literary sense. Poignantly antiphonal, it has none of the realism which so characterises the Barrack Room Ballads series as a whole, and has a chorus that makes sense only in a song. The picture Kipling draws of the soldier...

Surely the finest of Kipling's many celebrations of comradeship, the song features one of his loveliest and most lingering refrains. The Biblical phrase in the coda is from the story of David and Jonathan ("Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women": 2 Samuel, 1:26)

Holidaying in Bermuda in 1894, Kipling was entertained by a veteran Sergeant who confided in him this shameful tale. Kipling did not identify the action but it appears to have involved a North African unit, very likely part of the Sudan Expeditionary Force on their ill-fated mission to relieve Khartoum and rescue General Gordon. Contemporary accounts of the first battle of El Tab on 4th Februar...

The lower ranks of the Army served as an anonymous refuge for many disgraced or impoverished gentlemen (including at least one old schoolfriend of Kipling). Out of place among the troopers, shunned by the officer class, the "poor little lambs" offer a different light on and an indictment of the rigid class system giving rise to their plight. Kipling's portrait is sympathetic but clear-eyed and ...

Poor, uneducated and ingenuous, the raw recruit to service overseas faced as many fatal hazards off the battlefield as on it. Kipling records, with candid accuracy, the wise counsel of an experienced survivor, down to the famous and brutal last stanza.

One of Kipling's best known and best loved works. Bellamy's setting is by no means the first, though some previous efforts have failed to reflect perhaps to recognise the strong element of pathos and underlying bitterness. "Mandalay" was inspired by the reminiscences of participants in the third Burmese War (1885-90), ending with the overthrow of the tyrant King Thibaw. Kipling himself visited ...

"the six year men are free...", this being the minimum period of service with the Colours. The song is full of the joy and optimism of the soldiers returning home from long service overseas, without regard to the precarious future that awaits them (though the poet is well aware of it). MALABAR and JUMNA were two of the battalion-size troopships doing duty to and from India.

One of Kipling's "smash hits", it made a huge immediate impact when first published. Even those detractors who deem Kipling a versifier rather than a poet generally concede this to be an exception. Kipling witnessed and reported military executions, though the poem's eponymous victim is fictional. The routine was exactly as recorded here in fine, horrifying detail.

Among the least well known of the Barrack Room Ballads, this song shows Kipling's ability to encapsulate a way of life in one small episode: a proletarian comedy of manners in four stanzas.

In December 1878 disaster befell a squadron of 10th Hussars attempting to cross the Kabul River. Swept away by rapids, weighted down by their cloaks and equipment, some 50 men were drowned or kicked to death by frantic horses. Though no major loss in the context of the bloody second Afghan War, the tragedy (no doubt because it was an accident, not a battle) caused deep shock at home and evident...

Kipling added many expressions to the language but not, as sometimes thought, the soubriquet "Tommy Atkins" which dates back to the time of Waterloo. Kipling's soldiers' poems, however, make one feel he really SHOULD have been the inventor; none more so than his indictment of society's attitude to the private soldier: "...making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep..." Another robust...

The short service system introduced by Cardwell in 1871 improved both recruitment and, by virtue of the regulars being younger and fitter, the Army's fighting calibre. Note, though, the poet's point that training was hampered by the shedding of experienced men. But for "the man of four an' twenty that asn't learned of a trade", reduced to the Reserve for 12 years on fourpence a day, one alterna...

The Widow at Windsor