Kipling's Barrack-Room Language

Abstract

SINCE MORE PERSONS are, in all probability, today speaking English in barracks than ever before, in East and West, North and South, the classical record of barrack room speech by Rudyard Kipling assumes new interest. Military life on a large scale always tends to democratize and refurbish speech, at the same time giving new impulses to the more artistic forms of expression. Poetry was not, it seems, born in the universities, though it has often died there; it was born in the tents before Troy. The ways of language and art are basically much the same, from war to war and age to age. Something of what Kipling made from the speech of Tommy Atkins in India over fifty years ago new writers are in the near future bound to make, with only incidental differences, from the speech of American expeditionary forces. So it is tempting to glance back on Kipling's remarkable accomplishment with the assurance that it represents a permanent contribution and an inspiring example to English literature. Reaction against Kipling, it is true, began when he himself reacted against his own better genius. No one ever did more to cast doubts and shadows upon achievements of his earlier years. In place of the vital, dialectical language and lively, realistic art of his early works he fed the public with solemn, banal moralizings, commonly of the most vulgar character, and often in behalf of no enviable political cause. The lesson of his career is too well known today to bear restatement. Yet his remarkable ballads shine as brightly as on the day of their appearance, challenging renewed interest and linguistic reinterpretation. The poems with which this article deals are his first and incomparably his finest series, that devoted to the Indian service and written between 1889 and 1891. They are only twenty in number. Here his work becomes by all odds the most interesting to both the linguist and the literary critic, since it so far surpasses his later writing in both dialectical and imaginative style. Although the language of these ballads rather than their versification concerns us here, a few glimpses at their verse form shows Kipling's sensitivity to popular rhythms. The use of tripping anapests in the chorus to Danny Deever, in contrast to the grave iambs of the stanzas themselves, goes far to express the masterly irony of the first and most brilliant of his lyrics. While the heart is heavy, the body is forced to march briskly to a military quick-step. The movement of the chorus