My Boy Jack

Rudyard Kipling has been one of my favourite authors for a very long time, and on this Armistice Day I would like to share his poem MY BOY JACK with my regular blog readers.

“Have you news of my boy Jack?”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Has any one else had word of him?”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind —
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

With his father's enthusiastic encouragement, John Kipling (who was usually called Jack by his family) joined the 2nd Battalion, Irish Guards despite having such poor eyesight that he could have been exempted from military service. He was killed at the Battle of Loos in September 1915, and Rudyard Kipling was grief-stricken for the rest of his life.

Rudyard Kipling subsequently acted as literary adviser to the Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission), and devised the inscription 'Their Name Liveth For Evermore' on cemetery memorial stones and 'Known unto God' on the gravestones of those soldiers who bodies could not be identified.

This last must have been particularly poignant for Kipling as his own son's body was never identified.