The Beginnings

"The Beginnings" is a 1917 poem by the English writer Rudyard Kipling. The poem is about how the English people, although naturally peaceful, slowly become filled with a hate which will lead to the advent of a new epoch.

"The Beginnings" in A Diversity of Creatures

The first four stanzas have four lines each with alternate rhymes, while the fifth (and final) stanza has five lines. The last line of every stanza ends with "... the English began to hate". The context is the anti-German sentiment in Britain during World War I.[1][2] Kipling was known for never portraying Germans in a positive light, and had been the first to use the word "Hun" as a slur for Germans.[3] The poem was written following the death of his son in that war.

The poem first appeared in Kipling's 1917 collection A Diversity of Creatures, where it accompanies the short story "Mary Postgate". The story had originally been published in 1915, but without the poem.[1]

A modified version of the poem, in which "Saxon" has substituted "English" and the poem retitled: "The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon", has been widely circulated on the internet, often attributed to Kipling and without acknowledging the change from the poem Kipling wrote.

The perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque shootings included Rudyard Kipling's "The Beginnings/Wrath of the Awakened Saxon" alongside Dylan Thomas' "Do not go gentle into that good night" and William Ernest Henley's "Invictus" in his manifesto, The Great Replacement, named after the white replacement theory[4] of the same name espoused by French writer Renaud Camus.[5]

References
  1. Booth, Howard John (2011). The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 87. ISBN 9780521199728.
  2. "Jingoism was only one front in Rudyard Kipling's war". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 2017-09-15.
  3. The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007. p. 65. ISBN 9780199282661.
  4. Browne, Anthony (September 3, 2000). "The last days of a white world". The Guardian. Retrieved August 1, 2020.
  5. Kornhauber, Spencer (March 16, 2019). "When Poems of Resilience Get Twisted for Terrorism". The Atlantic. Retrieved July 19, 2019.

Works related to "The Beginnings" at Wikisource

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