Kipling The Mystic?

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I recently borrowed a couple collections of Rudyard Kipling poems from my local library. I have never really read any of his works but recently became acquainted with his poem “The Beginning” in which every quatrain ends with “the English began to hate”, published in 1917 after his son died in WWI – and I decided that I should become familiar with his work. Now, some people may clutch their pearls at such an announcement. “What – Kipling? The ‘White Man’s Burden’ Kipling? OMG, he’s so Victorian and so pro-Empire and so Raaaycist and so Eeeevil! How can you possibly read such vile trash?” My reply: I am an adult who can make his own decisions and make up his own mind. Besides, I have read widely from English literature from Chaucer on to the present day and at this point little surprises me. Besides, I like to read the works of people who have been long dead: it gives a window into not only the thoughts of the poet/author, but also into a time which had different experiences, different mores, different values than are prevalent today. So, I guess you can call me a bit of a time-traveller!

Of course, I had known about Kipling my whole life. I grew up with Disney’s animated Jungle Book and even had a drinking cup with an image of Baloo the Bear on it when I was a wee lad. I remember buying a copy of the Guiness Book of World Records 1973 in an airport bookstore when my family was enroute somewhere and devoured the thing (except for the sports stuff) – and in it was the record for the most popular greeting card of all time: it was from the 1910s or 1920s, if I recall correctly, and on it was an illustration of a young couple on a date. The young man asks the young lady, “Do you like Kipling?” and her reply was “Why, I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled.” I guess Kipling was all the rage back then. I have no idea why I remember these bits of trivia, but that’s the way my brain works.

By now I have read a fair number of Kipling’s poems. And besides appreciating his seemingly effortless style and the various “voices” that he uses, I also appreciate a lot of his themes: the bittersweet life of the expatriate (having been one for a few short periods of my life), the common sense of the common folk, the soldier who is lionized during times of war and despised after the war, and – what I found most surprising – a yearning for, and savouring of, the sensory experiences associated with his birthplace: India. This latter point I appreciate on two fronts: one, I understand what it is to miss even the simple things of one’s birth-country when separated from it for an extended period of time; and two, having lived in India twice in my life, there are certain sounds and smells and sights of that country that I miss to this day.

I also envy Kipling’s time, when a talented writer could achieve considerable fame and fortune, as much of the public read voraciously and children in school were taught to memorize a lot of poems (my parents, who were schooled between the two World Wars, were probably the last generation in the West to experience that; my mother was able to recite quite a few of those poems from memory well into her nineties). Ah, the days before radio, and then television, and then computer screens, and now phone screens sucked the time, attention, and life out of society! Not as though I am jealous of Kipling: my creative writing talent is a “candle” standing next to his “sun”.

As a whole, I have enjoyed Kipling’s poems. I can see why he was so popular: he was not being pretentious or elitist or trying to impress other poets within a small circle of mutual admirers. No; he spoke elegantly about matters that a good proportion of the British population at the time could relate to, appreciate, and sometimes laugh at.

Going through the book of collected poems I became familiar with the themes that Kipling was fond of and returned to time and again. Nothing grandiose. Nothing particularly profound. That all changed while I was in the midst of reading "The Answer”, which I reproduce in its entirety below:

 A Rose, in tatters on the garden path,

Cried out to God and murmured ‘gainst His Wrath,

 Because a sudden wind at twilight’s hush

 Had snapped her stem alone of all the bush.

 And God, Who hears both sun-dried dust and sun,

 Had pity, whispering to that luckless one,

 ‘Sister, in that thou sayest We did not well –

 ‘What voices heardst though when thy Petals fell?’

 And the Rose answered, ‘In that evil hour

 ‘A voice said, “Father, wherefore falls the flower?

 ‘“For lo, the very gossamers are still,”

 ‘And the voice answered, “Son, by Allah’s Will!”’

Then softly as a rain-mist on the sward,

 Came to the Rose the Answer of the Lord:

 ‘Sister, before We smote the Dark in twain,

 ‘Ere yet the Stars saw one another plain,

 ‘Time, Tide, and Space, We bound unto the task

 ‘That thou shouldst fall, and such an one should ask.’

 Whereat the withered flower, all content,

 Died as they die whose days are innocent;

 While he who questioned why the flower fell

 Caught hold of God and saved his soul from Hell.

 Well, this was a whole new Kipling – one whom I did not expect! A Kipling who could give me goosebumps!

Granted, it is in the nature of a poet to be reflective and to dive deeply into the human condition. This is why poets and authors of fiction are usually at the forefront of a culture change: they are the sensitives who are not only able to sense certain shifts in the collective unconscious but are also consciously aware of it and are able to appropriately express it – and even steer it to some degree. Oftentimes they can seem to be prophetic. In a sense, they dwell on the fringe of society as they can see things that are not apparent to the overwhelming majority of people.

Just the same, we are in the habit of categorizing or classifying poets. If one wants a mystical trip, read Blake or Whitman, but not Kipling, right? I guess it goes to show that more people than what one might suspect may have “mystical moments” from time to time. Perhaps there are more “gems” like “The Answer” among Kiplings’ poems – I can’t say for sure, as I am far from having read all of them. There may also be other poets who have similar such “gems” hidden among their works. Good reason for us to keep on reading the works of dead poets!

I cannot say with certainty whether Kipling penned “The Answer” honestly or whether it was tongue-in-cheek – I don’t know enough about the man and the poet to say it. And although it would be good, I suppose, to know the answer to the question, in the end it does not matter that much to me. Why? The reason is that communication is not precise the way mathematics is. Kipling wrote the poem with certain thoughts in his mind and certain feelings in his soul; unless he actually explained what they are, we can never know for certain what they are.

That’s part of it. But another part of it is that communication has a ‘sender’ (in this case, Kipling) and a ‘receiver’ (in this case, all people who have read the poem). Suppose that a poll is taken of Kipling’s readers with the question “What did Kipling’s poem ‘The Answer’ mean to you?” The poll results would include a large number of replies in one or a few interpretations, followed by a smaller number of outliers. But would the poll reveal the “real” meaning of the poem (based on the largest number of replies)? Of course not! Such an exercise would be absurd. What I am getting to is this: something which is considered to be ‘common’ or ‘worldly’ for most people can be supremely, ecstatically divine to a mystic. It is a matter of perception. There is a story of the 19^th century Hindu mystic saint Ramakrishna going into ecstasy over the sights of common things (a flock of white cranes with dark clouds behind them, a boy standing with one leg slightly bent and his two arms bent at the elbows) because of what they meant to him spiritually. When I was a young man, I was surprised when a middle-aged mystic friend told me that he liked a popular love song; when I stated my surprise, he told me that the lyrics of the song reminded him of his soul’s yearning for God. Lesson learned.

In the same way, not only do mystics recognize and identify with stories or songs that directly address mysticism but can – sometimes for uniquely individual reasons – see the Divine in ‘common’ things. Ultimately, it matters little what the composer/writer’s ‘intention’ of a song or story was; if the listener or reader is finely attuned to the Divine, then that person will be reminded of the Divine during the experience of listening or reading. As the perception, so the experience.

But what of the premise of the poem – that everything is fated from before the beginning of time? Does it not rankle our sensibility of being able to influence our own fate, or even contradict plain common sense? Can every little thing that happens be willed by the Divine? And, if so, why? I am no theologian or deep scholar of religions, but I do know that during the devout Medieval times, it was believed that angels are able to see all past, present, and future simultaneously. And if that is so with angels, would it not be true higher up the “great chain of being” to God? I see no reason why this would not be so. Such things are supremely difficult for our minds to comprehend, being as they are subject to the sensory experiences that are bound by both time and space. It is like trying to imagine something that is without form. What impresses me the most in the poem “The Answer”, however, is how compassionately the Divine answers the question of the fallen rose, as if it is just as beloved to the Divine as anything else in creation. Perhaps from the Divine vision, all are one. It is this thought that I find to be highly transcendental and mystical and consequently fills my being with bliss. I hope that I am not alone in this regard.