The Years Between
In 1919, Rudyard Kipling published his first collection of new poems in sixteen years. The silence had been forced upon him by history: his only son Jack died at the Battle of Loos in 1915, and the trenches had swallowed a generation. This collection emerges from that devastation, raw with a father's grief and a nation's trauma. Here is "My Boy Jack," the unbearable poem about a mother searching for her lost son, and "The Female of the Species," Kipling's most quoted and most ferociously misunderstood meditation on nature's darker impulses. Here too is "For All We Have and Are," the bracing wartime address that refuses easy justifications. These are not poems of comfort. They are poems of duty, memory, and the terrible calculus of sacrifice. This is Kipling at his most exposed: stripped of imperial certainty, speaking from the wreckage. The collection endures because it captures not merely one man's sorrow but the collective silence of a civilization confronting what it had done and what had been done to it.
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“The Sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part;But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the careful soul and the troubled heart.And because she lost her temper once, and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest,Her Sons must wait upon Mary's Sons, world without end, reprieve, or rest.It is their care in all the ages to take the buffet and cushion the shock.It is their care that the gear engages; it is their care that the switches lock.It is their care that the wheels run truly; it is their care to embark and entrain,Tally, transport, and deliver duly the Sons of Mary by land and main.””
— Rudyard Kipling
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Kipling, Rudyard. The Years Between. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-years-between-40802504-d5f4-4f59-94f2-921df801da53.Kipling, R. (n.d.). The Years Between. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-years-between-40802504-d5f4-4f59-94f2-921df801da53Kipling, Rudyard. The Years Between. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-years-between-40802504-d5f4-4f59-94f2-921df801da53.
