If...

Sometimes you realise that people who lived and died a long time ago have still got something to say about the times in which we live. This is of course an obvious sort of observation. But when I say 'realise', I use it here in the sense of 'make real (to yourself)'. This is the sort of epiphany you get when you idly leaf through the poems of long-dead people like Chesterton, Blake, Donne or Kipling, stuff you used to read as part of an English Lit course or just for background atmosphere.

And then it hits you how some of these poems line up; how sometimes it becomes clear that the issue being written about was something that may actually have consumed the author in his search for meaning.

Take for example the third stanza of Kipling's 1897 Recessional:

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
   Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe—
Such boasting as the Gentiles use
   Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget, lest we forget!

And the first lines of Kipling's 1895 Ballad of East and West:

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!

It's quite clear that Kipling, for all his jingoistic reputation and tendencies, was conflicted between his appreciation of non-white humanity and his inborn (inbred?) urge to see his own nation as the crown of all humanity. The caution he sounds for his own people and the readiness to praise the qualities he found elsewhere don't quite jibe with the idea that he was an out-an-out racist.

The conditional 'if' also gets a full measure of elaboration in this famous poem of his. To my mind, this piece perhaps shows that perhaps Kipling's idea of real dichotomy was not that between different kinds of race, in that Victorian sense; rather, it was that between the real person working and getting his hands dirty and living life, and the person who was not so exposed. It was, to him, a real issue that a man should know how to use power and not be corrupted by it; it was a real issue about how people should strive to be more than their natural inclinations would have seemed to allow.