The barrack-room ballads of Rudyard Kipling Book

The song lyric is a form of poetry; we forget this at times, don’t think of the words we hear sung everyday as poetry, but they are, as surely as the stuff written down in books. The ‘ballads’ name here is appropriate (though many are not in strict ballad form), as any one of these could be readily set to music (and more than a few have).

The ‘dialect’ in these pieces is a bit off-putting. It’s something to expect from Kipling, of course, and maybe it is even realistic for the men ‘speaking’ them at that time. Mostly, it’s too much of the same — the same patterns of speech, the same subject matter — and a lot of it not really that interesting. Of course, there are the few standouts, the ones that have become widely known — ‘Gunga Din,’ ‘Mandalay,’ two or three others.

Kipling’s ideas are sometimes distasteful to modern senses (and even those of his own time), his ‘benevolent’ racism, his imperialism. We do have to recognize that the poems in ‘Barrack-Room Ballads’ reflect the views of the men they portray as much as they do Kipling himself. Take them as a picture of a world that once was.

One word that comes to me when I read these poems is ‘facile.’ Rudyard Kipling certainly had a way with words and maybe we should expect nothing more here than some well-crafted verses and some superficial thoughts. That is, after all, more than we get from many poets!