Publication
This is the heading to the first chapter of “The Light that Failed”. The book had a complex publishing history, see the headnote. Kipling ascribes the lines to
Big Barn Stories (“The Childhood of Dick and Maisie”). Betty Miller comments:
In putting the verse at the head of this opening chapter, Kipling has himself defined the origin of his situation; placed it at a specific moment in his own childhood, when he was five and his sister was only three.
[Rudyard Kipling; the Man, his Work and his World, Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1973 p. 6]
[G.A.]
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