These are the Four

Publication

Published with “The King’s Ankus” in The Second Jungle Book (1895).
Collected in Songs from Books, in the style and metre of “The Law of the Jungle”, with the subscript Jungle Saying.

The poem

These lines have an echo of Proverbs 30,15-16:

‘There are three things that are never satisfied, Yea, four things say not, ‘it is enough’: the grave; and the barren womb; the earth that is not filled with water; and the fire that saith not, ‘It is enough’.

[F.A.U..]