Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). Verse: 1885–1918. 1922.

In the Neolithic Age

1895

IN the Neolithic Age savage warfare did I wage

For food and fame and woolly horses’ pelt;

I was singer to my clan in that dim, red Dawn of Man,

And I sang of all we fought and feared and felt.

Yea, I sang as now I sing, when the Prehistoric spring

Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove;

And the troll and gnome and dwerg, and the Gods of Cliff and Berg

Were about me and beneath me and above.

But a rival of Solutré, told the tribe my style was outré—

’Neath a tomahawk, of diorite, he fell.

And I left my views on Art, barbed and tanged, below the heart

Of a mammothistic etcher at Grenelle.

Then I stripped them, scalp from skull, and my hunting dogs fed full,

And their teeth I threaded neatly on a thong;

And I wiped my mouth and said, “It is well that they are dead,

“For I know my work is right and theirs was wrong.”

But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole-shrine he came,

And he told me in a vision of the night:—

“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,

“And every single one of them is right!”

*****

Then the silence closed upon me till They put new clothing on me

Of whiter, weaker flesh and bone more frail;

And I stepped beneath Time’s finger, once again a tribal singer,

And a minor poet certified by Traill.

Still they skirmish to and fro, men my messmates on the snow,

When we headed off the aurochs turn for turn;

When the rich Allobrogenses never kept amanuenses,

And our only plots were piled in lakes at Berne.

Still a cultured Christian age sees us scuffle, squeak, and rage,

Still we pinch and slap and jabber, scratch and dirk;

Still we let our business slide—as we dropped the half-dressed hide—

To show a fellow-savage how to work.

Still the world is wondrous large,—seven seas from marge to marge—

And it holds a vast of various kinds of man;

And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu,

And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.

Here’s my wisdom for your use, as I learned it when the moose

And the reindeer roared where Paris roars to-night:—

“There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,

And—every—single—one—of—them—is—right!”