Description

 

 

Kipling, Rudyard (1865 – 1936)

Kipling quotes from Kabir, whose poetry style he adopted in The Jungle Book

An original and scarce handwritten poem by Rudyard Kipling entitled ‘A Song of Kabir’, penned neatly on an off-white 4.5″ x 2.25″ sheet, which is signed and dated below, ‘Rudyard Kipling, Engelberg, 1912.’ The poem reads: ‘My brother kneels, so saith Kabir, / To stone and brass in heathen wise: / But in my brother’s voice I hear / My own unanswered agonies. / His God is as his fates assign – / His prayer is all the world’s – and mine.’

Matted and framed with a handsome vintage portrait photo of Kipling to an overall size of 10″ x 14.5″; frame backing bears an affixed sheet of ‘Bateman’s Burwahs, Sussex’ letterhead, 4.75 x 6.25, which is annotated in the hand of Kipling’s widow, Caroline Starr Balestier, who writes: ‘With Mrs. Rudyard Kipling’s compliments. 9th February 1938’. In fine condition, with light silvering to the edges of the image.

Kipling was much influenced by the poet Kabir. This poem was first published by Kipling in his collection The Seven Seas (1895). It also appears as a chapter epigraph in Kim (1901). It is also notable that some passages of The Jungle Book were modelled quite carefully on Kabir’s style, for example the Law of the Jungle section, with its terse moral statements, and a different Song of Kabir poem appears in the Second Jungle Book (1895).