50+ Lifestyles

Max’s Musings

By Max Molleston

The oldest collection in my poetry library, not the most ancient poet, is a publication from Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, and dated  1900, titled  The Writings in Prose and Verse of Rudyard Kipling. It is Kipling’s early verse (rhyming poems) dating back into the 1880s. The book is in very good shape for its age, with the binding needing to be glued again to the cover. Rudyard  Kipling continues to be one of the best recognized of his or any period (the blocks of years a poet/poems continue to have a stage). Kids in grade schools and middle and high schools were led, in a more distant past, to his verses. They were popular in the sense of recognition, and were  catchy enough to get school kids to memorize a few of them to spout to assembled parents and others.

Kipling’s poems were in no way limited in scope and lent  their wordings and rhyming to the ear. For many, Kipling had some grit and adventure that would be appreciated when recited.  Over his career, his travels gave him great opportunity to see, feel and sense people and their places. One-hundred thirteen pages into this tome, up came  three stanzas titled Land-Bound. We here can call ourselves in the Upper Midwest  land-bound.  We  are  inland, fly-over territory of these United States on maps and in minds;  a popular conception.

               LAND-BOUND

Run down to the sea, O River,
Haste thee down to the sea—
To the foaming strife at the Bar
Where the grey breakwaters are,
And the buoys roll merrily
In the dip and heave of the sea
Coming over the Bar.

Bear me with thee O River—
On the rush of thy flood to the sea—
I am sick of this smooth green land ;
I long for the breeze off the sand.
Take me away with thee
To the shifting face of the sea,
And the low wind-bitten  strand.

Bare me swiftly, O River,
My heart is athirst  for the  sea,—
To the dotted herring-floats
And the brown, tar-fragrant boats,
And the little wave-washed quay—
I am sick of hedge-row and tree,
And the hills with their stifling coats.

The rhyme foundation is surely clear in this poem, as is the imagined speaker “sick and tired” of these plains, where  most waterways, no matter their abilities to carry away rainfall, flow to rivers of the Mississippi basin watershed, and  move to the Gulf of Mexico, a mixture of movements of the  Atlantic Ocean.  So, the message in the text of the poem has lots to say about today, given controversy over its detrimental content, as waters flowing into the Mississippi River course to the Gulf of Mexico. The verses voice another common  thought,  if not a plea for action, about a get-away. This speaker wants a permanent displacement, while we think about, and many times activate that desire to catch a time period near or on a seacoast, escaping, at a substantial cost, most of the cold winter months in the northern plains.

Rudyard Kipling is a worthy and exciting read, given the comfort of time and willingness. His poems are enjoyable to hear and to read. They have meaning.

Join me in a month’s time  “write hear.”