In the Neolithic Age

Rudyard Kipling

1895

In the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage
       For food and fame and woolly horses' pelt.
I was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man,
       And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt.
Yea, I sang as now I sing, when the Prehistoric spring
       Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove;
And the troll and gnome and dwerg, and the Gods of Cliff and Berg
       Were about me and beneath me and above.
But a rival, of Solutre, told the tribe my style was outre-
       'Neath a tomahawk, of diorite, he fell
And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged below the heart
       Of a mammothistic etcher at Grenelle.
Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting-dogs fed full,
       And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong;
And I wiped my mouth and said, "It is well that they are dead,
       For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong."
But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole-shrine he came,
       And he told me in a vision of the night: -
"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
       "And every single one of them is right!"
       . . . . . . .
Then the silence closed upon me till They put new clothing on me
       Of whiter, weaker fresh and bone more frail; .
And I stepped beneath Time's finger, once again a tribal singer,
       And a minor poet certified by Traill!
Still they skirmish to and fro, men my messmates on the snow
       When we headed off the aurochs turn for turn;
When the rich Allobrogenses never kept amanuenses,
       And our only plots were piled in lakes at Berne.
Still a cultured Christian age sees us scuffle, squeak, and rage,
       Still we pinch and slap and jabber, scratch and dirk;
Still we let our business slide-as we dropped the half-dressed hide-
       To show a fellow-savage how to work.
Still the world is wondrous large,-seven seas from marge to marge-
       And it holds a vast of various kinds of man;
And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu
       And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.
Here's my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose
       And the reindeer roared where Paris roars to-night:-
"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
       "And-every-single-one-of-them-is-right!"

This is www.PaulTaylor.EU/algorithms/Kipling.html and it was derived from algorithms/Kipling.tex which was last modified on 21 July 2007.