Written in the Cockney of the ordinary British soldier, these poems made Kipling famous. Here are the hanging of Danny Deever, Tommy Atkins scorned in peacetime, the water-carrier Gunga Din, the Sudanese “Fuzzy-Wuzzy”, the Widow at Windsor and a soldier’s longing for Mandalay. Their imperial and racial attitudes are those of the 1890s.
Ballads whose rhythms and refrains entered the language, for readers of Victorian verse and the empire’s army. Download the free EPUB.