Poems by Rudyard Kipling



 ALTAR

L'envoi

 

 

The smoke upon your altar dies

The flowers decay

The Goddess of your sacrifice

Has flown away

What profit then to sing or slay

The sacrifice from day to day ?

 

'We know the shrine is void' they said

' the Goddess flown '-

'Yet wreaths are on the Altar laid-

'The Altar-Stone

is black with fumes of sacrifice,

'Albeit she has fled our eyes.

 

'For it may be if still we sing

'And tend the Shrine,

'Some Deity on wandering wing

'May there incline;

'And finding all in order meet,

'Stay while we worship at her feet.

 

 

Back               Home

 

[ Sent  by  Edward  Radfall ]

 


 

THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS

 

They shut the road through the woods

seventy years ago.

Weather and rain have undone it again

And now you would never know

There was once a road through the woods

Before they planted the tree's

 

It is underneath the coppice and the heath

And the thin anenomes

Only the keeper sees

That where the ring dove broods

And the badgers roll at ease

There was once a road through the wood

 

Yet if you enter the woods

Of a summer evening late

When the night air cools on the trout ringed pools

Where the otter whistles his mate

(they fear not men in the woods

because they see so few)

You will hear the beat of a horses feet

And a swish of a skirt in the dew

Steadily cantering through

The misty solitudes

As thought they perfectly knew

The old lost road through the woods....

But there is no road through the woods.

 

Back               Home

 

[ Sent  by  Edward  Radfall ]

 


If 

 



If you can keep your head when all about you 
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; 
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, 
But make allowance for their doubting too; 
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, 
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies, 
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating, 
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise; 

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master; 
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim; 
If you can meet with triumph and disaster 
And treat those two imposters just the same; 
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken 
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, 
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken, 
And stoop and build 'em up with worn out tools; 

If you can make one heap of all your winnings 
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, 
And lose, and start again at your beginnings 
And never breath a word about your loss; 
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew 
To serve your turn long after they are gone, 
And so hold on when there is nothing in you 
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on !"; 

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, 
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch; 
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you; 
If all men count with you, but none too much; 
If you can fill the unforgiving minute 
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run - 
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, 
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

Back               Home

 

[ Sent By Tanmoy Saha ]