Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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

Rebirth

IF any God should say

“I will restore

The world her yesterday

Whole as before

My Judgment blasted it”—who would not lift

Heart, eye, and hand in passion o’er the gift?

If any God should will

To wipe from mind

The memory of this ill

Which is mankind

In soul and substance now—who would not bless

Even to tears His loving-tenderness?

If any God should give

Us leave to fly

These present deaths we live,

And safely die

In those lost lives we lived ere we were born—

What man but would not laugh the excuse to scorn?

For we are what we are—

So broke to blood

And the strict works of war—

So long subdued

To sacrifice, that threadbare Death commands

Hardly observance at our busier hands.

Yet we were what we were,

And, fashioned so,

It pleases us to stare

At the far show

Of unbelievable years and shapes that flit,

In our own likeness, on the edge of it.