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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 » Poison of Asps


Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

Poison of Asps

A Brazilian Snake-Farm
"POISON of asps is under our lips"?
Why do you seek us, then?
Breaking our knotted fellowships
With your noisy-footed men?
Time and time over we let them go;
Hearing and slipping aside;
Until they followed and troubled us-so
We struck back, and they died.
"Poison of asps is under our lips"?
Why do you wrench them apart?
To learn how the venom makes and drips
And works its way to the heart?
It is unjust that when we have done
All that a serpent should,
You gather our poisons, one by one,
And thin them out to your good.
"Poison of asps is under our lips."
That is your answer? No!
Because we hissed at Adam's eclipse
Is the reason you hate us so.
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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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