Rudyard Kipling (Редьярд Киплинг)

In the Case of Rukhmibhaio

                         1 

Gentlemen reformers with an English Education—
    Lights of Aryavarta take our heartiest applause,
For the spectacle you offer of an 'educated' nation 
    Working out its freedom under 'educated' laws.

                         2 

Laudable your sentiments, eloquent your diction,
    For your flowing periods, all our language racked is.
May a brutal Briton ask:—'Wherefore then the friction 
    'Twixt the golden Principle and the grubby Practice.'

                         3 

Gentlemen reformers, you have heard the story
    Weighed the woman's evidence—marked the man's reply.
Here's a chance for honour, notoriety and glory! 
    Graduates of culture will you let that chance go by?

                         4 

[You can lecture government, draught a resolution— 
    Sign a huge memorial—that Calcutta saw.
Never such an opening for touching elocution—
    As the text of Rukhmibhaio, jailed by Hindu law]

                         5 

What? No word of protest? Not a sign of pity?
    Not a hand to help the girl, but, in black and white
Writes the leading oracle of the leading city:— 
    'We the Indian nation, we hold it served her right.

                         6 

Wherefore, gracious government, let her do her sentence: 
    Learn the majesty of Law, teach our erring wives—
By a six months' sojourn in a common prison pent—hence
    She and they are cattle at our service all their lives.'

                         7 

Gentlemen reformers, you can understand the loathing 
    That would fill your bosoms did a mehter claim to share
On the strength of velvet skull-cap and a suit of snowy [clothing 
    Your name and rank and prospects and a seat beside your chair]

                         8 

[Very hard it is to keep in bounds of decent moderation— 
    And grief to smother epithets unseemly out of place
When excellent reformers chose to call themselves a nation
    And clamour for equality beside the higher race.

                         9 

It is then the brutal Briton feels an impulse, wild, unruly— 
    That tingles in the toe nails of a non-official boot—
Lumps in one mean heap of cruelty the graduate and cooly— 
    And the old race-instinct answers to the clamour:—Hut you brute.

                         10 

Which is barbarous and savage but the graduate of culture
    May console himself with thinking of the proverb wise and old
'Though you paint him as a peacock, still the vulture is a vulture'—
    And the dôm is still an outcast though you plate his back with gold.]

1. An Auto-da-fé
2. Before My Spring
3. Index Malorum
4. I Sit in the Midst
5. The Ballad of the Cars

Распечатать (To print)

Количество обращений к стихотворению: 1700

Последние стихотворения

To English version