Poetry Monday!: "Dane-geld" by Rudyard Kipling

"We never pay any-one Dane-geld, / No matter how trifling the cost; / For the end of that game is oppression and shame, / And the nation that pays it is lost!"

Here's "Dane-geld" (1911) by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936):

It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say: --
"We invaded you last night--we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."

And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!…

For the rest of my "Sasha Reads" playlist, click here. Past poems are:

1. "Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
2. "The Pulley" by George Herbert
3. "Harmonie du soir" ("Evening Harmony") by Charles Baudelaire
4. "Dirge Without Music" by Edna St. Vincent Millay
5. "Clancy of the Overflow" by A.B. "Banjo" Paterson
6. "Лотова жена" ("Lotova zhena", "Lot's wife") by Anna Akhmatova
7. "The Jumblies" by Edward Lear
8. "The Conqueror Worm" by Edgar Allan Poe
9. "Les Djinns" ("The Jinns") by Victor Hugo
10. "I Have a Rendezvous with Death" by Alan Seeger
11. "When I Was One-and-Twenty" by A.E. Housman
12. "Узник" ("Uznik", "The Prisoner" or "The Captive") by Aleksandr Pushkin
13. "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins
14. "The Song of Wandering Aengus" by William Butler Yeats
15. "Je crains pas ça tellment" ("I'm not that scard about") by Raymond Queneau
16. "The Naming of Cats" by T.S. Eliot
17. "The reticent volcano keeps…" by Emily Dickinson
18. "Она" ("Ona", "She") by Zinaida Gippius
19. "Would I Be Shrived?" by John D. Swain
20. "Evolution" by Langdon Smith
21. "Chanson d'automne" by Oscar Milosz
22. "love is more thicker than forget" by e.e. cummings
23. "My Three Loves" by Henry S. Leigh
24. "Я мечтою ловил уходящие тени" ("Ia mechtoiu lovil ukhodiashchie teni", "With my dreams I caught the departing shadows") by Konstantin Balmont

Comments

[Rossami]

That's a great poem. One of my favorite authors.

I'm not making the connection to the Kelo video, though.
Ah, nevermind. That was odd. When the article first loaded, the embedded video was about the Kelo decision. When I scrolled back up to double-check my spelling, the embedded video had changed to the reading of this poem. Very strange. If it helps to diagnose, I'm using Firefox with NoScript.

[bernard11]

So you are unlike the fellow who, when asked if he liked Kipling, said he didn't know, because he had never kippled.

[Brett Bellmore]

"Kippling" is the practice of putting Kipling's poems to music, and singing them. For instance.

[Brett Bellmore]

One of my favorite Kipling poems, and as usual, good advice.

Incidentally, while we're on the topic of Kipling, there's a poem of his that's annoyingly just out of reach of my memory. The topic was the dependence of cities on food shipments?

[Sasha Volokh]

Not sure, might it be this? https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/tale_of_two_cities.html

[Brett Bellmore]

No, this one had to do with trains full of grain going into a city, and it rapidly falling when they were cut off. But, to be honest, I may be misattributing it to Kipling. It just seems in retrospect like the sort of topic he'd write on.

[David Friedman]

I don't think that is a Kipling poem.

[The Drill SGT]

Wonderful poem, by chance, I have in the last week, watched two movies based on his works. "Gunga Din" and "The Man who would be King",

Dane-Geld ranks third for me, an ex-soldier behind "Tommy" and The Young British Soldier"

Sasha, one of those soon please....

[Cal Cetín]

Have the Danes become gelded?

[Cal Cetín]

https://www.esmmagazine.com/uncategorized/denmark-sets-world-record-for-organic-food-sales-in-2019-122831

[catter]

The quintessential armed and agile nation of Kipling's day was Great Britain. He was far too clever to miss that. I've long wondered how he meant that first line.
See Recessional or Arithmetic on the Frontier.

[Jeff Walden]

Seems like a very good fit for why Texas has its own electrical network, unconnected from any federal grid, to avoid federal power regulations.

However nice it might have been for Texas to be able to draw on other states' power (assuming it was actually there to be drawn on -- and certainly there wasn't enough for the actual shortfall Texas faced), once you sign up, the Danes are gonna start imposing on how you do things inside your system.

[David Friedman]

It's a good poem, but there are lots of other good poems by Kipling you could read. My favorite is probably "The Mary Gloster," but it's too long for your purposes. "Hymn to Breaking Strain" is very good and not well known.

And there are lots of good poems by other people you could do. You have done one by Millay, but both "Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare" and "Love is not all, it is not food or drink" are, I think, even better.

And I don't think you have done anything by Hopkins. Either "Spring and Fall to a Young Child" or "Windhover" would be suitable. G.K.Chesterton has some wonderful doggerel, such as "The Horrible History of Jones," as well as more serious things, such as "Ballade of a Suicide" or "The Last Hero." I admit that Lepanto is a bit long, and "Ballad of the White Horse," which is very good, a great deal longer.

[Sasha Volokh]

Hopkins is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voz0q5fp9Ws

[David Friedman]

And you could do MacDonough's song, Kipling's anarchist poem:

Whether the State can loose and bind
In Heaven as well as on Earth:
If it be wiser to kill mankind
Before or after the birth--
These are matters of high concern
Where State-kept schoolmen are;
But Holy State (we have lived to learn)
Endeth in Holy War.