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Barrack-Room Ballads

Rudyard Kipling · poetry collection, 1892·1 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
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  • It opens with a soldier marched out to hang. In "Danny Deever," a private is executed for shooting a sleeping comrade, and the drill-sergeant answers every question in flat procedure: "They've taken of his buttons off an' cut his stripes away, / An' they're hangin' Danny Deever in the mornin'."
  • "Tommy" turns civilian contempt into a public indictment. The narrator gets refused service ("We serve no red-coats here") and shoved into cheap seats at the theatre, yet the same crowd needs "Special train for Atkins" the second a troopship sails for war.
  • "Fuzzy-Wuzzy" salutes the one enemy who broke a British square. Kipling has the narrator praise a Sudanese warrior with insult and respect at once: "You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man," then admits "you broke the square," the sole battlefield failure the collection credits to an enemy.
  • "Gunga Din" ends by ranking a servant above the men he served. The despised water-carrier who is kicked and cursed through the poem dies dragging the narrator to safety and says only, "I 'ope you liked your drink." The closing line flips the whole poem's contempt: "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!"
  • "Mandalay" is homesickness for a country, not a woman. The soldier remembers a Burmese girl by the Moulmein Pagoda, "her petticoat was yaller an' her little cap was green," but the real ache is for the place itself: back in London's "blasted Henglish drizzle," he admits "I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land."
  • The book closes on a soldier who cannot explain what he saw. In "For to Admire," a time-expired six-year veteran sails home past Aden and finds he cannot describe his own life to the women waiting for him, so he sings instead: "I cannot say the things I feel, / And so I sing my evenin' song," ending on the refrain that gives the whole book its restless engine: "It never done no good to me, / But I can't drop it if I tried!"
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it is the book that put the word "Tommy" into permanent use for the British soldier, and it did it by writing entirely in his own barrack-room dialect rather than an officer's polished English.

Kipling puts the British Empire's common soldier at the center of Victorian poetry, writing entirely in the grunt's own dropped-h slang instead of an officer's or poet's voice.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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