meet with verse in the same kind, concerning which it may at once be
said that at all times, except where the rule is proved by the
exception, Mr Kipling's verse is less urgently inspired than his prose.
The true motive which drives a poet into verse is the perception of a
quality in the thing he has to say which requires for its delivery the
beat and lift of a rhythm which crosses and penetrates the rhythm of
sense and logic. This is true even of the poetry which seems, at
first, to contradict it. Pope's _Essay on Man_, for example, which at
first seems no more than a neater prose than the prose of Addison, is
really not prose at all. In addition to the cool sense of what appears
to be no more than a pentametric arrangement of common-places there is
a rhythm which admirably conveys, independently of what is being
actually said, the gentle perambulating of the eighteenth-century
philosopher in the garden which Candide retired to cultivate in the
best of all possible worlds. In all poetry there must be a manifest
reason why prose would not have served the author's purpose equally
well.

Can we say this of Mr Kipling's poetry? Is Mr Kipling's poetry the
result of an urgent need for a metrical utterance?

A careful reading of Mr Kipling's verse, comparing it subject for
subject with his prose, soon convinces us that, far from being a more
direct passionate and living utterance than his prose, it is invariably
more wrought and careful and elaborate. It does not suggest the poet
driven into song. It suggests rather the skilful writer borrowing the
manner of a poet, playing, as it were, with the poet's tools, without
any urgent impulse to express himself in that particular way. He has
merely added to the number of rules to be successfully observed. Of
his technical success there is seldom any doubt at all. For a