Source
Published in Echoes by Two Writers, August 1884. Collected in Outward Bound, De Luxe, Sussex and Burwash Editions.
The poem
A pithy introduction to this collection of parodies by Rudyard, then aged eighteen, and his young sister ‘Trix’, who were living with their parents in Lahore.
By collecting it, Kipling seems to acknowledge this item as his own; but the initials “J.L.K.”in the copy sent to his Aunt Louisa (Mrs. Alfred Baldwin, see the Baldwin papers at the University of Sussex Special Collections) suggest that the epigraph may have been written by his father.
Arguably, the lines, as from a minstrel celebrating the new work of the young in old-established styles, come well from Lockwood, himself an experienced writer.
See our notes on “A Vision of India”
[J.R./P.H.]
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