Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) remains despised by his detractors, dismissed as an  irredeemable racist promoter of colonialism. Meanwhile, that dismissal prompts some of his admirers to praise his works for extra-literary reasons, which is just as bad. Almost no one gets Kipling right, so this major and wide-ranging literary talent — the author of memorable poetry, superior fiction, and enduring children’s books — is a blank stone in the garden of English literature.

The Sun has featured three Kipling poems as Poems of the Day: “The Way through the Woods,” “When Earth’s Last Picture Is Painted,” and “Tommy.” For a fourth it’s worth thinking about “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” a poem that Kipling’s detractors and admirers alike reference more often than they quote. Written in quatrains of rhymed couplets, with six-foot alexandrine lines (mostly, in Kipling’s poem, two three-foot phrases strung together with a strong caesura between), the poem contrasts the Gods of the Market-Place with the Gods of the Copybook Headings — the soft self-congratulatory ideas of the age with the hard enduring truths. The first name he filches from Francis Bacon’s 1620 account of the “Idols of the Market Place,” and the second from the often banal truisms that schoolboys were suppose to inscribe in their copybooks.

The made-up names of geological epochs — Cambrian, Feminian, Carboniferous — are references to movements in Kipling’s time: the Cambridge advocates of universal peace, the women suffragettes, the coal-worker Labor activists. But the claim of the poem is as universal as a parallel passage in Horace: People may convince themselves of claims that have sufficient “Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind” to soothe a wishful heart, but the logics of social behavior and physical reality will always return to exact their due.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings
by Rudyard Kipling

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch.
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch.
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four —
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began: —
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.