Today’s Poem: The Changelings

Adam Roberts on Kipling’s war poem after the death of his son

Norman Wilkinson’s Dazzle Ships: A Convoy, 1918 (Royal Museums Greenwich)

Adam Roberts is a genius, a mad and wonderful polymath, whom we at

Poems Ancient and Modern

follow in astonishment and awe. (You should too: He blogs here.) An academic at Royal Holloway, University of London, he’s the author of over twenty novels, a critic of music and post-Renaissance Latin poetry, and the author of the Plagrave History of Science Fiction. His most recent novel is The Death of Sir Martin Malprelate. There seems nothing Roberts can’t do, and when he proposed writing a note on one of Kipling’s lesser-known World War I poems, we leapt at the opportunity to present it.