'And I Know Not Where He Is Laid'

On this date, Dec. 23, in 1916, Rudyard Kipling published a Christmas poem, “A Nativity,” in the Daily Telegraph, but that’s a small part of the story. John Kipling was the poet’s only son. He was killed on Sept. 27, 1915, in the Battle of Loos. The British suffered more than 59,000 casualties in that thirteen-day slaughter. Less than six weeks earlier, John had turned eighteen. When Kipling wrote the poem, and in fact for the rest of his life (he died in 1936), the whereabouts of his son’s body remained unknown. Thus, the unfathomable poignance of these lines:

“‘Is it well with the child, is it well?’

     The waiting mother prayed.

‘For I know not how he fell,

     And I know not where he is laid.’”

In 1992, researchers identified the younger Kipling’s grave in St. Mary’s ADS (Advanced Dressing Station) Cemetery in Haisnes. The finding was challenged but in 2015, following an internal review, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission confirmed that the body of the unidentified Irish Guard found in 1919 and buried at St. Mary’s was Second Lt. John Kipling.

Compare how Kipling treats his son's death with a poem like Edward Hirsch’s unseemly Gabriel: A Poem (2014). In “He the Compeller,” an essay by Turner Cassity collected in Politics and Poetic Value (University of Chicago Press, 1987), edited by Robert von Hallberg, Cassity writes:

“. . . Kipling became a political poet because he preferred writing in the second or third person to writing in the first person. In the 834 pages of the collected poems there is exactly one lyric written in propria persona, and that is the final one [“The Appeal”] . . . . The poems give delight frequently, but they also raise disquiet. To read them (as to read Crabbe) is to suspect that meditation and the first person have rather paupered English poetry. The hermetic lyric of personal emotion and its sloppier successor, the psychological self-search, account for an appalling percentage of all verse.”