Has anyone—other than Peter Bellamy—done any serious work on Kipling's relationship with and contributions to the folk tradition? Yesterday I was flipping through a copy of Captains Courageous (1897) that I found on the used-book shelf in Stop & Shop and noted the number of sea-songs he either references or quotes explicitly, and while I am sure he did not write "The Dreadnought," I am still looking for a version of "Wheat in the Ear" that is not spliced into a Southern game-song by Gordon Bok. This is not a new thought. I have had various of the Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) stuck in my head since last summer. Fragments of The Seven Seas (1896) keep turning up in my stories. And I am hardly the first person to notice how many of his poems are written like songs, as though to invite setting; there is even an ongoing catalogue being compiled. So I want to know: where's the scholarship on it?
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- 1: Is this your name or a doctor's eye chart?
- 2: And they won't thank you, they don't make awards for that
- 3: No one who can stand staying landlocked for longer than a month at most
- 4: But the soft and lovely silvers are now falling on my shoulder
- 5: What does it do when we're asleep?
- 6: Now where did you get that from, John le Carré?
- 7: Put your circuits in the sea
- 8: Sure as the morning light when frigid love and fallen doves take flight
- 9: And in the end they might even thank me with a garden in my name
- 10: I'd marry her this minute if she only would agree
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