Rudyard Kipling's "The Roman Centurion's Song"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2024

⏱️ 7 minutes

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Summary

Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was an English journalist, novelist, poet, and short-story writer. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work.

Kipling's works of fiction include the Jungle Book duology (The Jungle Book, 1894; The Second Jungle Book, 1895), Kim (1901), the Just So Stories (1902) and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888). His poems include "Mandalay" (1890), "Gunga Din" (1890), "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919), and "If—" (1910). He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story. His children's books are classics; one critic noted "a versatile and luminous narrative gift".

Kipling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was among the United Kingdom's most popular writers. Henry James said "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known." In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and at 41, its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and several times for a knighthood, but declined both. Following his death in 1936, his ashes were interred at Poets' Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey.

-bio via Wikipedia

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, September 13th, 2004.
0:10.6	Today's poem is by Rudyard Kipling, and it's called The Roman Centurion Song.
0:16.5	Today is the feast or commemoration of St. Cornelius, the centurion, the first Gentile convert to Christianity.
0:25.6	He's called, as stories recorded in chapter 10 of the book of Acts.
0:30.7	And fun fact, the event of his conversion is the same moment when Christians discover that they are allowed to eat bacon and really never looked back.
0:42.5	Because there are no great poems about Cornelius that I am aware of, if you know some, please let me know about them.
0:51.1	Instead, I've chosen a tangential poem about a Roman centurion, written by
0:57.5	Rudyard Kipling, to feature in the historical textbook of a friend of his, C.R. L. Fletcher's,
1:07.4	a school history of England. He wrote several, in fact, 23 short poems on historical
1:15.5	topics to be included as literary examples in that textbook. This is the story of and spoken in
1:24.5	the voice of a Roman centurion who's living in Rome during the occupation,
1:29.9	the Roman occupation of Britain sometime around the year 8,300.
1:34.5	And he's been called home.
1:36.6	But this is a difficult piece of news for him.
1:40.5	He's come to this far edge of the empire and, to his surprise, found something that he loves dearly.
1:49.1	And his love and nostalgia for Rome are then put side by side with his new and perhaps stronger or equally strong love for this place that he has been stationed
2:04.3	for so long, Britannia, which is a nice parallel for Cornelius, who was also a Roman soldier
2:12.4	from far away.
2:13.4	He was a part of the Italian Legion, but had been sent to really this backwater edge of the empire
2:21.5	and the other far edge of the empire.
2:24.9	And there found something that he truly loved and could not leave behind.
2:30.7	Not an earthly kingdom, but the kingdom of heaven. Here is Kipling's, the Roman
	...

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