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The
Gods of the Copybook Headings
Rudyard
Kipling October 1919
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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." |
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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." |
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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." |
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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. |
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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; |
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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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>>> Go HERE
For a very well done essay on the "Copybook" poem --- includes explanations
of words and concepts. Adapted from work by Dr. Martin Spiller. |
More... Copied
from: research.info.com
The
Gods of the Copybook Headings is a poem published by Rudyard Kipling in
1919, containing "age-old, unfashionable wisdom" that he saw as having
been forgotten by society and replaced by "habits of wishful thinking."
The "copybook
headings" to which the title refers were proverbs or maxims, extolling
virtues such as honesty or fair dealing that were printed at the top of
the pages of 19th-century British students' special notebook pages, called
copybooks. The school-children had to write them by hand repeatedly down
the page.
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More... Copied
from: The
Intellectual Activist
The
title of Rudyard Kipling's poem is obscure today but would have been clear
to any educated Englishman of his day. A copybook was a kind of penmanship
exercise in which the student copied over and over again a sentence printed
in the heading at the top of each page. These copybook headings were usually
aphorisms or statements of commonsense wisdom, so Kipling used the Gods
of the Copybook Headings as a symbol for basic, immutable truths.
The point of
the poem is that the various schemes for "social progress" being promoted
at the time -- and most of them are still with us today -- are based on
denying the basic truths represented by the Gods of the Copybook Headings.
Kipling's derisive
reference to the "Gods of the Market Place" was not intended as anti-capitalist.
"The market" is not short for "the free market," as it is in contemporary
parlance. Rather, the "market" refers to the public spaces where people
gather to listen to demagogues who promise the impossible and the irrational
-- the function performed by CNN today.
by Robert
Tracinski Jun 02, 2010
Currently writing
at RealClearMarkets
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Additional links:
http://www.johnderbyshire.com/Reviews/Considerations/kipling.html
Rudyard
Kipling's The Gods of the Copybook Headings | Suite101.com
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