Today’s Poem: When Earth’s Last Picture Is Painted

Rudyard Kipling as Christian Aesthete

Giovanni Battista Gaulli, preparatory painting for The Triumph of the Name of Jesus, 1676 (Wikimedia Commons)0

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When Earth’s Last Picture Is Painted

by Rudyard Kipling

When Earth’s last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried,
When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,
We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it — lie down for an aeon or two,
Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew.

And those that were good shall be happy; they shall sit in a golden chair;
They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comets’ hair.
They shall find real saints to draw from — Magdalene, Peter, and Paul;
They shall work for an age at a sitting and never be tired at all!

And only The Master shall praise us, and only The Master shall blame;
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They are!

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Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was nearly as famous and celebrated as it was possible for an artist to be. Byron, Dickens, and the Beatles — the shooting stars of British fame — stand by themselves for the frenzy of interest in them, but Kipling comes at least in the second class. He was a solid best seller, and in 1907, at age 41, he became the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize — and still the youngest winner. His mixture of fiction and poetry was close to unique in English literature.

Kipling circa 1892 (Wikimedia Commons)

By the time of his death, however, his reputation was in decline. The Edwardians generally sneered at the Victorians, but they had a special contempt for Kipling, dismissing him as an imperialist and a favorite of the vulgar middle-class. To higher-class readers, he seemed an easy figure to mock and disparage.

Of course, once every few years, over the long decades since his decline, a new critic comes along to say that Kipling is due a revival — as any careful reading of the man shows his talent and range. But the praise has never gained much traction, and Kipling remains in the shadows.

Curiously, one feature of his thought is often missed by both those who praise Kipling and those who dismiss him — and that is his never-quite-lost love of the Aesthetes who seemed the peak of advanced literature when he was young. Kipling really was an Aesthete, somewhere deep in his formation, and it shows up from time to time in his short stories, his interests in art, and his poetry.

Look, for example, at Today’s Poem, “When Earth’s Last Picture Is Painted,” printed as the envoi to his 1896 collection of short stories, The Seven Seas. Think what you like of Kipling’s content, but he was never less than precise in the form of his meter and rhyme. A solid craftsman, he gives us solid English alexandrines — six-beat lines that express an exalted vision of the role of the artist. After salvation, we may find “the joy of the working.” Heaven will be the chance for cosmic art, where the artist “Shall draw the Thing as he sees It” (and notice that capitalized It — the noumenal thing in itself) “for the God of Things as They are.”

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