irst, to contradict it. Pope's _Essay on Man_, for example, which at
first seems no more than a neater prose than the prose of Addison, is
really not prose at all. In addition to the cool sense of what appears
to be no more than a pentametric arrangement of common-places there is
a rhythm which admirably conveys, independently of what is being
actually said, the gentle perambulating of the eighteenth-century
philosopher in the garden which Candide retired to cultivate in the
best of all possible worlds. In all poetry there must be a manifest
reason why prose would not have served the author's purpose equally
well.

Can we say this of Mr Kipling's poetry? Is Mr Kipling's poetry the
result of an urgent need for a metrical utterance?

A careful reading of Mr Kipling's verse, comparing it subject for
subject with his prose, soon convinces us that, far from being a more
direct passionate and living utterance than his prose, it is invariably
more wrought and careful and elaborate. It does not suggest the poet
driven into song. It suggests rather the skilful writer borrowing the
manner of a poet, playing, as it were, with the poet's tools, without
any urgent impulse to express himself in that particular way. He has
merely added to the number of rules to be successfully observed. Of
his technical success there is seldom any doubt at all. For a
craftsman who can use all the intricate resources of good prose
successfully to create an illusion that he is inspired in his least
abandoned moments, it is child's play to use the more obvious devices
of the metrician to similar effect. So far as mere formal excellence
is concerned, verse is a journeyman's matter as compared with prose;
and it is not at all astonishing to find that the formal part of poetry
troubles Mr Kipling not at all. But we must look beyond the formality
of verse to find a poet. Poetry flies higher than prose only when the
poet's feeling has driven him to sing what he cannot say. Mr Kipling
is a wonderful metrician; but that is not the question. The question
is, Where shall we find the most immediate union of the author's
feeling with the author's expression? And the answer to that will be,
Not in the author's poems.

Take as an example the English motive:

"See you our little mill that clacks,
So busy by the brook?
She has ground her corn and paid her tax
Ever since Domesday Book."

Compare this well-wrought stanza with the prose t