War Poetry: Rudyard Kipling: 'The Changelings'

War Poetry: Rudyard Kipling: 'The Changelings'
Excerpt:
Kipling's poem, 'The Changelings'.

The Changelings

Or ever the battered liners sank
   With their passengers to the dark,
I was head of a Walworth Bank,
   And you were a grocer's clerk.

I was a dealer in stocks and shares,
   And you in butters and teas,
And we both abandoned our own affairs
   And took to the dreadful seas.

Wet and worry about our ways---
   Panic, onset, and flight---
Had us in charge for a thousand days
   And a thousand-year-long night.

We saw more than the nights could hide---
   More than the waves could keep---
And---certain faces over the side
   Which do not go from our sleep.

We were more tired than words can tell
   While the pied craft fled by,
And the swinging mounds of the Western swell
   Hoisted us Heavens-high...

Now there is nothing---not even our rank---
   To witness what we have been;
And I am returned to my Walworth bank,
   And you to your margarine!
This is light verse of the darkest kind. Its rhythms are a variation on the ballad stanza --- four beats followed by three --- but their jauntiness disguises intimate dangers. How easy to read that final line as a joking pay-off, as if the speaker were to be believed that the horrors of war can be pushed away and a banal diurnal career resumed. Everything in the poem resists that paraphrasable meaning. Even the final exclamation mark manages to betray anxiety.

During the Boer War, Kipling had written of the difficulties faced by soldiers returning to civilian life. The irregulars come home to a petty, prissy nation, with its ''ouses both sides of the street'. In this context, there can be nothing pettier than a career in 'margarine'. For all that the banker and grocer are traumatised by memory of---a horrible euphemism---'more than the waves could keep', they continue to hanker for 'what they have been'. As the poem title reminds us, they have changed and cannot go back to their previous lives. Could it be that the trauma of naval warfare is outstripped by the greater trauma of trying to resume the trite rigmarole of civilian existence?