7 The White Man’s Burden (1899)

Rudyard Kipling

Temporary Introductory Material

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 McClure’s a few months later included an advertisement for Pears Soap—a British company—that used the poem’s title. We’ve included an image of the advertisement below, from the collection of the Library of Congress (loc.gov).

Brantlinger, Patrick. “Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and Its Afterlives,” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Volume 50, Number 2, 2007, pp. 172-191.

Pinney, Thomas. “Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard (1865–1936), writer and poet.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. January 07, 2016. Oxford University Press.

“‘The White Man’s Burden’: Kipling’s Hymn to U.S. Imperialism,” History Matters, American Social History Productions, Inc., 2018. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5478/

The White Man’s Burden

by Rudyard Kipling
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!
A full page advertisement. An oval frame shows an older, mustached, white man in a naval uniform washing his hands in the sink. In the corners around the oval frame are different types of boats on the sea in the top two corners, a third boat in the bottom left corner, this time landed on shore, with crates being emptied, and in the bottom right corner, a white missionary is handing soap to a kneeling man of colour who is wearing only a sash around his waist. The text reads, "The first step toward lightening the White Man's Burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness. Pear's Soap is a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilization advances, while amongst the cultured of all nations it holds the highest place--it is the ideal toilet soap."
This image of the ad ran in The Cosmopolitan, v. 27, May-Oct. 1899. Courtesy of Library of Congress.
  1. This is referring to the story in Exodus of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt, where they had been enslaved. Before they reached the place where they were to settle, they faced great hardships, including hunger and disease, which prompted such complaints 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” (Exodus 14:12) and “And the people thirsted there for water; and the people murmured against Moses, and said, Wherefore is this that thou hast brought us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?” (Exodus 17:3). ↵

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