Publication history
ORG Volume 8, p. 5441 records the first publication as the heading to “Up the River” the fourth of Kipling’s travel letters from his visit to Egypt in 1913, which first appeared in Nash’s and Cosmopolitan for September 1914. The first three verses without the title are as given in the two magazines. The complete poem appeared in Reveille Magazine of August 1918 (six verses with variations).
It is collected in:
- The Years Between 1919
- Inclusive Verse 1919
- Definitive Verse 1940
- Sussex Edition vol. 33, page 425
- Burwash Edition vol. 26
- The Works of Rudyard Kipling, Wordsworth Poetry Library 1994
See David Alan Richards p. 246 for further details of publication. There is a musical setting of this poem on Youtube sung by Peter Bellamy.
Theme and criticism
This poem is linked to Kipling’s account of his journey up the Nile in 1913, part of a visit to Egypt which he had found enlivening after the tiresome traumas of British politics in that year, and an uncomfortable journey from Marseilles by P. & O. steamer. Egypt reminded him of the sounds and smells of Muslim cities in India, and—in the Valley of the Kings—caused him to reflect on its strange echoes of the ancient past, part of the marvellous variety of human life as he had rejoiced in it over the years as he wandered over the world.
`Dr Tompkins (p. 245) writes:
In middle life, in the cheerfully serious verses of “A Pilgrim’s Way” Kipling had insisted that:
Heaven and Hell which in our hearts we have
Show nothing irredeemable on either side the grave
As a young artist, loyally open to all that was ‘given, he had not needed this fortifying chant. As an old one, he was content to separate what he saw from what he hoped, and to present his hopes with a fantasy that acknowledges the insuffency of the human imagination before ultimate mystery.
See also “The Holy War”
Notes on the Text
[Title] “A Pilgrim’s Way”:
This is a play on words, expressing two meanings, a way or method of performing some action, and a ‘Pilgrims’ Way’ or road leading to a shrine, like those of Thomas Becket at Canterbury—immortalised by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales)—or Santiago de Compostella in northern Spain.
See our notes on the “Prologue to the Master-Cook’s Tale”, which is linked to “His Gift” in Land and sea Tales. Also “The Two-Sided Man”, the heading for Chapter 8 of Kim.
[Verse 2]
Amorite: an ancient Semitic people living in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) some four thousand years ago.
Eremite: a hermit or religious recluse.
[Verse 5]
Heaven and Hell which in our hearts we have: See Luke 17.2 [D.H.]
‘And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, the Kindom of God cometh not with observation.’
[Verse Neither shall they say, Lo here! or lo there! for behold, the kingdom of God is within you.’
[Verse 6]
judge otherwise than I am judged: See Matthew 7.1-2: [D.H.]
Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
[J McG.]
©John McGivering 2011 All rights reserved