Returned.

This is coolbert:

Courtesy once more the input from the Internet web site "Bayou Renaissance Man"

Verse and poetry, Rudyard Kipling, the military dimension.

"Saturday Snippet: The return of a changed soldier, and a solemn reminder"

 bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com | Peter Grant | February 4, 2023.

Following last week's Kipling poem, several readers asked whether he'd written any other verse from the point of view of a veteran remembering his service.  Well, yes, he did:  and it's a rather good poem, too.  Here's "The Return".  It's the second-last in a sixteen-poem cycle titled "Service Songs", published in Kipling's collection "The Five Nations" in 1919.  It's set at the end of the Second Anglo-Boer War, and written from the perspective of a returning veteran who concludes England was worth his efforts.

(If you have difficulty understanding any of Kipling's terms, some of which he made up himself, the Kipling Society has some useful commentary on the poem.) - Peter Grant.

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"Peace is declared, an’ I return

  To ’Ackneystadt, but not the same;

Things ’ave transpired which made me learn

  The size and meanin’ of the game.

I did no more than others did,

  I don’t know where the change began.

I started as a average kid,

  I finished as a thinkin’ man.

[....]

If England was what England seems,

  An’ not the England of our dreams,

But only putty, brass, an’ paint,

  ’Ow quick we’d chuck ’er! But she ain’t!"

Devoted readers to the blog are encouraged to read the entire poem for yourself. Again as Peter Grant states, if you have any "difficulty understanding" refer to the Kipling Society web site.

Is Kipling even read or studied in institutions of higher learning any more? He would be considered to be too "colonial"?

coolbert.