ABSTRACT
Rudyard Kipling was the stunningly prolific and successful author of Kim, the Jungle Books, dozens of artful yet accessible poems, and a handful of masterly protomodernist short stories. The primary focus of that criticism is his defense of the British Empire. In light of an accelerating scholarly effort to “decolonize” the canon of English-language literature, we can hardly expect to see Kipling return to unalloyed favor among teachers or students of the humanities. The relative timorousness of Kipling’s speaker hardly comports with the image of a confident pukka sahib. The speaker conveys a striking sense of weariness and frustration with his role, as when he describes it in the first stanza as an “exile that hath no end.” For Kipling to substitute “exile” for “empire” was to reverse the Vergilian sequence and to recast the phrase in a way that hints at a kind of arduous hopelessness at the heart of Britain’s imperial project.
