Today’s Poem: The Changelings
Adam Roberts on Kipling’s war poem after the death of his son
Adam Roberts is a genius, a mad and wonderful polymath, whom we at
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.Adam Roberts writes:
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was 49 when the First World War began. Too old to enlist, he was, as Rodney Atwood says, “the unofficial spokesman for the British Empire and as ‘the soldiers’ poet’” and he “fought the Great War with his pen, and with his voice as a public speaker.” He published some 300,000 words during the war: articles, speeches, stories and poems.
Kipling’s son John tried to enlist in the Royal Navy, but was rejected because of his severe short-sightedness. He tried the army but was again turned down, until his father used his influence to get the authorities to overlook his eyesight. The boy was commissioned a second lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion, Irish Guards, at the age of just seventeen. He was killed in October 1915, at the Battle of Loos, to his father’s great grief.
Angered by German atrocities during their invasion of Belgium in 1914, and by the German Navy sinking the RMS Lusitania and the SS Arabic in 1915, Kipling regarded the war as “a crusade for civilisation against barbarism.” Yet Today’s Poem, his 1915 “The Changelings” is not a bellicose work. Opening with a reference to the Lusitania and Arabic sinkings, and spoken by someone whose eyesight was clearly good enough for naval service, it captures the sense of war as endurance, of hardship and suffering: a sea-change from civilian existence.
The speaker moves from being a bank manager in Walworth, south London, to an officer’s position on board a navy craft. The last stanza tells us that he has not kept his military title after demobilisation, which means we can be pretty sure he was a lieutenant (typically Royal Navy ranks of lieutenant commander and above were retained in civilian life, ranks of lieutenant and below were not). The poem is addressed to a comrade, somehow whose peacetime occupation was working as a clerk (pronounced “clark,” in the British way) in a grocer’s store. War threw them together, and though the poem is positioned at that point when they have both returned to civilian life, marine terminology haunts even the dry-land lives: Walworth Bank almost sounds like a marine feature, like Dogger Bank; margarine sounds like a sea-y mar- word.
The “pied craft” mentioned in the penultimate stanza is a specific detail from the dazzle patterns used to camouflage ships during the war, although the poem also hints at the pied piper leading his followers perhaps to disaster or perhaps to a new kind of life. The poem’s plain idiom expertly navigates its pungent, vertiginous shift in altitude, from the heaven-high great wave in the penultimate stanza, to the abyssal depths of the passengers drowned when their liner was torpedoed.
Kipling cannily plays a similar vertiginous perspective-pull trick with time, too: The two seamen in the poem serve for three years, a thousand days, and yet each night seems to last a thousand years. And whilst we can intuit that the speaker of the poem (a middle-class bank manager) and the person addressed (a lower-middle class grocer) were of different naval ranks, that difference in rank is obliterated not just in their return, but by their experiences: washed away, we might say, by the soaking sea. The poem talks only of we and us, of a shared experience that, when the two return to the land, is put behind them.
Except that of course the poem’s whole point is that the experience has not been put behind them. It is a poem, amongst other things, about seeing what cannot be unseen: “We saw more than the nights could hide — / More than the waves could keep.” Hard not to think of Kipling’s son John, denied a naval rank by his poor eyesight, commissioned into the army, last seen alive advancing myopically towards a German position at Loos. The poem concludes, “there is nothing to witness what we have been.” John’s body was never found.
The Changelings
R.N.V.R.
by Rudyard Kipling
Or ever the battered liners sank With their passengers to the dark, I was head of a Walworth Bank, And you were a grocer's clerk. I was a dealer in stocks and shares, And you in butters and teas; And we both abandoned our own affairs And took to the dreadful seas. Wet and worry about our ways — Panic, onset and flight — Had us in charge for a thousand days And thousand-year-long night. We saw more than the nights could hide — More than the waves could keep — And — certain faces over the side Which do not go from our sleep. We were more tired than words can tell While the pied craft fled by, And the swinging mounds of the Western swell Hoisted us Heavens-high . . . Now there is nothing — not even our rank — To witness what we have been; And I am returned to my Walworth Bank, And you to your margarine!
There's a short study in my library somewhere about how the monuments changed, post WWI, to reflect the new absence of any body to bury. Explosives and artillery had gotten so powerful that dog tags became necessary and were issued, and obliteration was plausible. Only naval deaths had been memorialized by absence, generally. So negative space and empty spaces suddenly aspirated in the architecture of the memorials of the Great War.