Publication
This eight-line poem heads chapter XI of The Light that Failed. It is collected as a ‘Chapter Heading’ in Definitive Verse, in Songs from Books without a title. In The Light that Failed (p. 180) Kipling attributes to The Only Son. He later used that title for the different verse which heads the story “In The Rukh” (Many Inventions 1893).
The poem
These lines draw on imagery from hunting and the English countryside, to comment on Dick’s blindness, and his alienation from his past.
dule (lines 5 and 6) means ‘woeful’.
[G.A.]
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