Here is
another set of quotations:
1. '...Hark ye, Ben. Here is
the sun going up to over-run and possess all Heaven for evermore. Therefore
(Still, man!) we'll harness the horses of the dawn. Hear their hooves? "The Lord himself shall
be unto thee thy everlasting light, and - " hold again ! After that climbing thunder must
be some smooth check - like great wings gliding. Therefore we'll not
have "shall
be thy glory", but "And thy God thy glory!" ...'
2. ...Then he wrote, muttering:-
the little smoke
of a candle that goes out.
...then with relief
the little smoke
that dies in moonlight cold.
Evidently he was snared by the rhymes of his first verse, for he wrote and
rewrote 'gold -
cold - mould'
many times. Again he sought inspiration from the advertisement, and set down,
without erasure, the line I had overheard.
And threw warm
gules on Madeleine's young breast.
...I found myself nodding approval ...
3. ... 'How is he chained?'
'With an iron band round his waist fixed to the bench he sits on, and a sort of
handcuff on his left wrist chaining him to the oar. He's on the lower deck
where the worst men are sent, and the only light comes from the hatchways and
through the oar holes. Can't you imagine the sunlight just squeezing through
between the handle and the hole and wobbling about as the ship moves?'
'I can, but I can't imagine your imagining it' .
The sources
of the last set of extracts are as follows:
1.
(…inch by inch, the untempered heat crept into the heart of the
Jungle, turning it yellow, brown, and at last black.} This is from "How Fear Came" in The Second Jungle
Book.
2.
( .
…Then came the Rains with a roar, and the rukh was blotted out in fetch
after fetch of warm mist,) This is from "In the
Rukh" in Many Inventions.
3.
(a porcupine's quills rattled in the thicket, and
in the darkness between the tree-stems he heard a hog-bear digging hard in the
moist warm earth, and snuffing as it digged) This is from "Toomai of the
Elephants" in The Jungle Book.
We have continued to fill the remaining gaps
in our notes on the verse in the New Readers’
Guide, including the 73 ‘chapter headings’
for various stories, including Plain
Tales from the Hills, and The Jungle
Books. Of some 640 poems in the Definitive Edition only four remain to
be annotated. You might like to take a look at "With Scindia to Delhi", "Belts", "The Prayer of Miriam Cohen", "In the Matter of One Compass", and "Pan in Vermont".
Good Springtime wishes to all
John R