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    Barrack Room Ballads
    Barrack Room Ballads
    Barrack Room Ballads
    Ebook103 pages41 minutes

    Barrack Room Ballads

    By Rudyard Kipling

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    About this ebook

    "The Barrack-Room Ballads" is a collection of songs and poems by Rudyard Kipling. They deal chiefly with the late-Victorian British Army and are primarily written in a vernacular dialect. This compendium contains some of Kipling's most famous work, and includes the poems "Gunga Din", "Tommy" and "Danny Deever". This wonderful and seminal collection of poems would make for a great addition to any bookshelf, and is certainly not to be missed by fans and collectors of Kipling's work. The poems contained herein include: Danny Deever; Tommy; Fuzzy-Wuzzy; Soldier, Soldier; Screw-Guns; Cells; Gunga Din; Oonts; Loot; 'Snarleyow'; The Widow at Windsor; Belts; The Young British Soldier; Mandalay; Troopin'; The Widow's Party, etcetera. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now, in an affordable, high-quality, modern edition. It comes complete with a specially commissioned biography of the author.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateJun 8, 2015
    ISBN9781473374997
    Barrack Room Ballads
    Author

    Rudyard Kipling

    Rudyard Kipling was born in India in 1865. After intermittently moving between India and England during his early life, he settled in the latter in 1889, published his novel The Light That Failed in 1891 and married Caroline (Carrie) Balestier the following year. They returned to her home in Brattleboro, Vermont, where Kipling wrote both The Jungle Book and its sequel, as well as Captains Courageous. He continued to write prolifically and was the first Englishman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 but his later years were darkened by the death of his son John at the Battle of Loos in 1915. He died in 1936.

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    • 4/5
      I love Kipling's poetry and find that some of his apparently jingoistic stuff is quite thoughtful underneath, putting forth the view of the ordinary soldier. Some of his war poems have quite an anti-war sentiment.
    • 3/5
      "Making mock o' uniforms That guard you while you sleepIs cheaper than them uniformsAnd they're starvation cheap."Somehow it doesn't matter to me that Kipling is jingoist and a patronizing racist and that occasionally I can't understand what he's talking about. Barrack room ballads was written for soldiers and Kipling understodd the soldier's experience and is not always complimentary to the Army command or to "The Widow of Windsor" and her wars. Readers will also find many phrases that have become commonplace in the language. While it lacks the some personal favorites ("If", "The Ballad of East and West"), this is a good collection to get an introduction to Kipling's poetry.
    • 4/5
      I love Kipling's poetry and find that some of his apparently jingoistic stuff is quite thoughtful underneath, putting forth the view of the ordinary soldier. Some of his war poems have quite an anti-war sentiment.

    Book preview

    Barrack Room Ballads - Rudyard Kipling

    BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS

    by

    Rudyard Kipling

    Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.

    This book is copyright and may not be

    reproduced or copied in any way without

    the express permission of the publisher in writing

    British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

    A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

    Contents

    Rudyard Kipling

    First Series (1892)

    Danny Deever

    Tommy

    Fuzzy-Wuzzy

    Soldier, Soldier

    Screw-Guns

    Cells

    Gunga Din

    Oonts

    Loot

    ‘Snarleyow’

    The Widow at Windsor

    Belts

    The Young British Soldier

    Mandalay

    Troopin’

    The Widow’s Party

    Ford o’ Kabul River

    Gentlemen-Rankers

    Route Marchin’

    Shillin’ a Day

    Second Series (1896)

    ‘Bobs’

    ‘Back to the Army Again’

    ‘Birds of Prey’ March

    ‘Soldier an’ Salor Too’

    Sappers

    That Day

    ‘The Men that fought at Minden’

    Cholera Camp

    The Ladies

    Bill ‘Awkins

    The Mother-Lodge

    ‘Follow Me ‘Ome’

    The Sergeant’s Weddin’

    The Jacket

    The ‘Eathen

    ‘Mary, Pity Women!’

    For to Admire

    Rudyard Kipling

    Rudyard Kipling was born in 1865 in Bombay, India. Amongst his family members he could number not only the famous painters Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter, but also Stanley Baldwin, a future Prime Minister. Kipling lived in India until the age of six, when his family took him back to England for schooling.

    In 1872, Kipling began boarding with the Holloway family in Southsea. Between 1878 and 1882, Kipling attended the United Services College at Westward Ho! in northern Devon. Nearsighted and physically frail, he was once again teased and bullied. However, it was also here that he developed a love of literature. Near the end of his stay at the school, it was decided that he lacked the academic ability to get into Oxford University on a scholarship, and so Kipling’s father secured a job for him in Lahore, Punjab (now Pakistan), working as the assistant editor of The Civil & Military Gazette.

    Between 1882 and 1886, Kipling wrote profusely. His first volume of poetry, Departmental Ditties, was published in 1886. He followed this with a vast amount of short stories: in 1888, he published six collections of short stories: Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Under the Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw, and Wee Willie Winkie.

    Following a dispute over pay, Kipling was discharged from The Pioneer in early 1889. Following this, he returned to London, the literary centre of the British Empire, where he was already a growing popular and critical success from afar. Over the next two years, he published a novel, The Light that Failed, had a nervous breakdown, and met an American writer and publishing agent, Wolcott Balestier, with whom he collaborated on a novel, The Naulahka.

    In 1892, Kipling married Caroline Balestier, the sister of an American friend, and the couple moved to Vermont in the United States, where her family lived. Their two daughters were born there and Kipling wrote his famous The Jungle Book (1894). In 1896, a quarrel with his wife’s family prompted Kipling to move back to England and he settled with his own family in Sussex. His son John was born in 1897.

    By now Kipling had become an immensely popular writer and poet for children and adults. His subsequent publications included Stalky and Co. (1899), Kim (1901) and Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906). Despite having turned down many honours in his lifetime, including a knighthood and the poet laureateship, in 1907, he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first English author to be so honoured.

    In 1915, his son, John, went missing in action during the Battle of Loos. Having played a major role in getting the chronically short-sighted John accepted for military service, Kipling had great difficulty accepting his son’s death and subsequently wrote an account of his regiment, The Irish Guards in the Great War. He also joined the Imperial War Graves Commission and selected the biblical phrase inscribed on many British war memorials: Their Name Liveth For Evermore.

    Kipling kept writing until the early thirties, but at a slower pace and with much less success than before. He died in 1936, at the age of 70, and is buried at Westminster Abbey. Today, Kipling’s reputation is a complex one: as the literary critic Douglas Kerr puts it, He [Kipling] is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with.

    Dedication: To T. A.

    Dedication

    To T. A.

    I have made for you a song,

    And it may be right or wrong,

    But only you can tell me if it’s true;

    I have tried for to explain

    Both your pleasure and your pain,

    And, Thomas, here’s my best

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