I want to share something personal with you. Some might not describe a poem or a reading as “personal.” For me, though, the stones that skip across the human soul and stir the waters never before disturbed are some of the most intimate things I could imagine. I rarely speak of them. Like most others, I’m too frightened (or vain) to talk of such things. But pain, illness, or an encroaching darkness has a way of loosening the corroded bolts on the old barn door. Thus, we read the inspired insight of that shepherd-king of Israel: “It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes” (Psalm 119:71). Back to the subject.
My father’s favorite writer and poet was the great and irreplaceably original Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). Born in British India to a notable civil servant and his wife, young Kipling was named after the place where his devoted parents met: Rudyard Lake in Strattfordshife, England. Some folks find Rudyard Kipling either embarrassingly anachronistic for postmodern tastes (British Empire and all) or lacking avec le degré d'ironie qui se doit (lacking in a supposed sophisticated irony required by some). Since I think the British Empire was likely one of the most benevolent administrative global powers in history (and why non-Anglo-Saxon nationals from Commonwealth countries still pour into the late Empire’s capital), and since I tend to be suspicious of literary pretension (quoting Gerard Manley Hopkins for affect rather than reading Gerard Manley Hopkins for effect) I embrace Kipling for the man he was. And it seems to me that the man he was is akin to Dickens. He depicted the underclass without robbing them of their humanity. Well, at any rate, I share this reading with you and yours.
If—