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About Rudyard Kipling

Kipling gained renown throughout the world as a poet and storyteller. He was also known as a leading supporter of the British Empire. As apparent from his stories and poems, Kipling interested himself in the romance and adventure which he found in Great Britain's colonial expansion.

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You are here: Home » British/American Poets » Rudyard Kipling » James I


Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

James I

1603-25
The child of Mary Queen of Scots,
A shifty mother's shiftless son,
Bred up among intrigues and plots,
Learned in all things, wise in none.
Ungainly, babbling, wasteful, weak,
Shrewd, clever, cowardly, pedantic,
The sight of steel would blanch his cheek,
The smell of baccy drive him frantic.
He was the author of his line--
He wrote that witches should be burnt;
He wrote that monarchs were divine,
And left a son who--proved they weren't!
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Thematically Related

Related Poets

  • William Ernest Henley — contemporary (Henley published Kipling's early work in the Scots Observer)
  • Robert Service — influence (Service's ballad style was shaped by Kipling; he was known as 'The Canadian Kipling')
  • Robert Louis Stevenson — contemporary (Stevenson praised Kipling as the most promising young writer of the era)
  • Robert Frost — stylistic (Both mastered accessible narrative verse; Frost admired Kipling's dramatic monologues)
  • George Gordon Byron — Border ballad tradition and narrative verse; Carrington compared Kipling's rise to Byron's after Childe Harold
  • Wilfred Owen — Fellow WWI poet whose work addresses the same conflict and generation
  • Kahlil Gibran — Shared exploration of life wisdom and the nature of work
  • Alfred Lord Tennyson — Military and imperial themes in narrative ballad form
  • Lewis Carroll — contemporary (Victorian narrative-verse contemporaries who each built large corpora bridging adult and children's verse)

More by Rudyard Kipling

  1. If
  2. Gunga Din
  3. Mandalay
  4. Boots
  5. Danny Deever

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