7 The White Man’s Burden (1899)

Rudyard Kipling

Introduction

The writer and poet Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was born in Bombay, India, where his father taught architectural sculpture. However, in 1871, his family left him and his siblings in England to complete their education. In visits with his aunt, who was married to the painter Edward Burne-Jones, he became familiar with many members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He returned to India in 1882 to become a subeditor for an Anglo-Indian newspaper. There, he became a celebrated journalist and returned to England in 1888 to write and become established in the London literary scene. He wrote extensively about India, including his Jungle Books and other works for children.

The poem is best known by this title, but it was originally published with this subtitle: “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands.” As History Matters explains, “Published in the February, 1899 issue of McClure’s Magazine [an American magazine], the poem coincided with the beginning of the Philippine-American War and U.S. Senate ratification of the treaty that placed Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba, and the Philippines under American control.” According to Patrick Brantlinger, Kipling originally sent this poem in November 1898 “to his friend Theodore Roosevelt, who had just been elected Governor of New York.” The poem was so successful that a few months later The Cosmopolitan included an advertisement for Pears’ Soap—a British company—that used the poem’s title (see fig. 3).


“The White Man’s Burden” by Rudyard Kipling was originally published in the February 1899 issue of McClure’s Magazine, which is available on Google Books. The poem is in the public domain.
The editorial notes and introduction are available under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Unless otherwise attributed, they were written by Dr. Kylee-Anne Hingston at the University of Saskatchewan.
Fig. 3 is in the public domain.

 

The White Man’s Burden
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
5
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.
Take up the White Man’s burden—
10
In patience to abide
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
15
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.
Take up the White Man’s burden—
The savage wars of peace—
Fill full the mouth of Famine
20
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hope to nought.
25
Take up the White Man’s burden—
No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper—
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
30
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go make them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.
Take up the White Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
35
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—
“Why brought ye us from bondage,
40
Our loved Egyptian night?”[1]
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Ye dare not stoop to less—
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness;
45
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.
Take up the White Man’s burden—
50
Have done with childish days—
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
55
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

 

Fig. 3. An advertisement for Pears’ Soap that ran in The Cosmopolitan from May to October, 1899.  Image from Wikimedia Commons, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1890sc_Pears_Soap_Ad.jpg.

 

Works Cited
Brantlinger, Patrick. “Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and Its Afterlives.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, vol. 50, no. 2, 2007, pp. 172–191. Project Muse, muse.jhu.edu/article/209518.
Kipling, Rudyard. “The White Man’s Burden.” McClure’s Magazine, vol. 12, no. 4, Feb. 1899, pp. 290–291. Google Books, www.google.ca/books/edition/McClure_s_Magazine/hF0DAAAAMAAJ.
Pinney, Thomas. “Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard (1865–1936), writer and poet.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford UP, 7 Jan. 2016. Oxford Reference Online, www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-34334.
“‘The White Man’s Burden’: Kipling’s Hymn to U.S. Imperialism,” History Matters, American Social History Productions Inc., 2018. historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5478/.

  1. This alludes to the biblical narrative of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, where they had been enslaved. As the Israelites wandered through the wilderness toward the place where they were to settle, they faced great hardships, including hunger, disease, and the pursuing Egyptian army. On several occasions, they made complaints to Moses, such as “Is not this the word that we told thee in Egypt, saying, Let us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians? For it had been better for us to serve the Egyptians, than that we should die in the wilderness” (KJV, Exod. 14.12) and “Wherefore is this that thou hast brought us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?” (KJV, Exod. 17.3).

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