The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Does anyone like poetry, at all?

I have been reading several posts which talk about our current age. Mostly lamenting, sometimes with some shreds of hope. And I like poetry. Some poetry. Poetry experts might be able to tell me what type once they have seen a couple of these posts.

But much of the poetry that I like is basically incomprehensible to modern readers. So what I thought I would do is post footnoted versions of some of them. Beginning with this one:

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

by Rudyard Kipling

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,

I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.¹

Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings,² I notice, outlast them all. ³

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn

That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:⁴

But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,⁵

So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind. 

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,

Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,

But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come

That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome. 

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,

They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;⁶

They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;⁷

So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things. 

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.

They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.

But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,⁸

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know." ⁹ 

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life

(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)¹⁰

Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,¹¹

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death." ¹² 

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all, 

By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul; ¹³

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy, 

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."  

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled,¹⁴ and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew

And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true

That All is not Gold that Glitters,¹⁵ and Two and Two make Four¹⁶

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up¹⁷ to explain it once more. 

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man

There are only four things certain since Social Progress began. ¹⁸

That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire, ¹⁹

And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;²⁰

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world²¹ begins

When all men are paid for existing²² and no man must pay for his sins,²³ 

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, 

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!²⁴

1. Meaning the ephemeral ideas of each time. The ones the world tries to ‘sell’ you on.

2. Back in the day, students in school would have a ‘copybook’; which was a preprinted notebook. These copybooks would often have sayings at the top of each page, things considered very important by their society. Such as ‘In Adam’s Fall, we Sinned All’. So, the sayings in this poem would all have come from the top of some copybook page.

3. Meaning, as the poem will make clear, that he is contrasting ephemeral current ideas with long understood common sense truths.

4. Two common sense ideas contrasted with all sorts of glorious nonsense promoted by the world.

5. We were sure we knew more than the common sense that our ancestors taught us.

6. A play on the idea that the moon is made of green cheese.

7. Again, two proverbs turned on their head: Wishes aren’t horses, and pigs don’t have wings… that is the common sense position.

8. A rather American view of firearm ownership and prescient of what happened in Germany.

9. An old proverb and related to Chesterton’s fence. The idea is that there are always things about the way a culture works that are irritating or seem old-fashioned. But getting rid of them in a careless way can lead to disaster.

10. A wonderful equivocation of the word ‘love’. The preachers of the day preached as if they were promoting the kind of love that Christianity preaches but morphed that love into sexual license. The ‘neighbour’ starts as a random stranger but morphs into the man next door. Thus, ‘loving his wife’ means adultery, open marriage, polyamory, sex parties, etc.

11. This is a combination of Scriptural threats. Gen 20:18 speaks of adultery being a cause of barrenness. Romans 1 speaks of sexual sin and lack of reason being part of the punishment for a lack of faith

12. Romans 6:23

13. he combines a proverb ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ here, which is a comment on financial folly (since now Peter is mad at you and will come after you for what is stolen from him) and a slap at socialism (individual Peter vs collective Paul).

14. A pun with ‘fell down’ and ‘market crash’.

15. An old proverb, meaning not everything that looks shiny (nice) is valuable.

16. Just a little more complicated than one plus one equals two.

17. An interesting variation on the idea that the Gods of the Copybook Headings never altered their pace. Here we have the idea that they weren’t able to run fast enough to keep up with all the modern changes, but came up lame trying.

18. The ‘only four things’ starting with three th i ngs concept comes from Scripture, where you have ‘three no four’ idea:

Pro 30:15  The horseleach hath two daughters, crying, Give, give. There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things say not, It is enough:

Pro 30:18  There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not:

Pro 30:21  For three things the earth is disquieted, and for four which it cannot bear:

Pro 30:29  There be three things which go well, yea, four are comely in going:

19. II Peter 2:2, Proverbs 26;2,11

20. I believe this is a play on ‘once burnt, twice shy’ vs the way the book of Proverbs treats the fool who never learns.

Pro 17:10  A reproof entereth more into a wise man than an hundred stripes into a fool.

21. The title of a dystopia.

22. Bread and circuses, basic income, welfare, etc. And the beginning of another equivocation with ‘paid’ meaning first ‘given an income’ and second meaning ‘receive the penalty for’.

23. Not meaning in God’s eyes, but meaning that society had no functioning justice system that penalised real crimes.

24. The lack of common sense in the way the society was being run will produce devastating results.