https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_sussex
God gave all men all earth to love,
But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Belovèd over all;
That, as He watched Creation’s birth,
So we, in godlike mood,
May of our love create our earth
And see that it is good.
2
So one shall Baltic pines content,
As one some Surrey glade,
Or one the palm-grove’s droned lament
Before Levuka’s Trade.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground—in a fair ground—
Yea, Sussex by the sea!
3
No tender-hearted garden crowns,
No bosomed woods adorn
Our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs,
But gnarled and writhen thorn—
Bare slopes where chasing shadows skim,
And, through the gaps revealed,
Belt upon belt, the wooded, dim,
Blue goodness of the Weald.
4
Clean of officious fence or hedge,
Half-wild and wholly tame,
The wise turf cloaks the white cliff edge
As when the Romans came.
What sign of those that fought and died
At shift of sword and sword?
The barrow and the camp abide,
The sunlight and the sward.
5
Here leaps ashore the full Sou’west
All heavy-winged with brine,
Here lies above the folded crest
The Channel’s leaden line;
And here the sea-fogs lap and cling,
And here, each warning each,
The sheep-bells and the ship-bells ring
Along the hidden beach.
6
We have no waters to delight
Our broad and brookless vales—
Only the dewpond on the height
Unfed, that never fails—
Whereby no tattered herbage tells
Which way the season flies—
Only our close-bit thyme that smells
Like dawn in Paradise.
7
Here through the strong and shadeless days
The tinkling silence thrills;
Or little, lost, Down churches praise
The Lord who made the hills:
But here the Old Gods guard their round,
And, in her secret heart,
The heathen kingdom Wilfrid found
Dreams, as she dwells, apart.
8
Though all the rest were all my share,
With equal soul I’d see
Her nine-and-thirty sisters fair,
Yet none more fair than she.
Choose ye your need from Thames to Tweed,
And I will choose instead
Such lands as lie ’twixt Rake and Rye,
Black Down and Beachy Head.
9
I will go out against the sun
Where the rolled scarp retires,
And the Long Man of Wilmington
Looks naked toward the shires;
And east till doubling Rother crawls
To find the fickle tide,
By dry and sea-forgotten walls,
Our ports of stranded pride.
10
I will go north about the shaws
And the deep ghylls that breed
Huge oaks and old, the which we hold
No more than Sussex weed;
Or south where windy Piddinghoe’s
Begilded dolphin veers
And red beside wide-bankèd Ouse
Lie down our Sussex steers.
11
So to the land our hearts we give
Till the sure magic strike,
And Memory, Use, and Love make live
Us and our fields alike—
That deeper than our speech and thought,
Beyond our reason’s sway,
Clay of the pit whence we were wrought
Yearns to its fellow-clay.
12
God gives all men all earth to love,
But since man’s heart is small,
Ordains for each one spot shall prove
Beloved over all.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground—in a fair ground—
Yea, Sussex by the sea!
Rudyard Kipling was born in 1865 in Bombay, British India. Before the modernist de-colonist politically correct anti-patriarchy global citizens jump up in violent anger, in 1865 the place where Rudyard Kipling was born was called Bombay and it was under the governance of the British government, hence British India. Just as Syria was ‘Roman Syria’ from 64 BCE after Pompey had King Antiochus XIII Asiaticus executed (which then was instant and clear), so history of the last few thousand years on the land mass of Asia, middle Asia, the Mediterranean and Europe, to include the British Isles and Eire over the Channel, but not Norseland or Iceland, has been the emergence of societal governance under empires not city states, and the command of one land under another, often ruled from a distinct place a long way away in geographical and cultural terms. Alexander was a long way from the further reaches of his empire, Rome was a long way from its subject states, and so London was far from the far reaches of empire. It was what it was, and this particular blog does not believe in re-incarnation, therefore Rudyard Kipling did not choose to be born in Bombay in 1865.
Now named back again as Mumbai to native place, by native humans, after the weight of colonial rule has ended, Mumbai directly reinstates the local goddess Mumbadevi, the patron goddess of the Koli fishing folks who lived for a very long time on the islands and estuary where the men would have gone out on the boats and the females gave birth, kept the hearth, knew about food from the land, and all together made up a whole sustainable community with no thought (it can safely be said) about notions of patriarchy or inclusivity and diversity or equality, because all together such communities make up one Whole.
Rudyard Kipling, born where he was, knew the British Empire from the inside, and also the trauma of being transported from India to England to abuse foster homes and the very, very strict education which boys of the Empire underwent. He was also not part of the actual government, but his father was the Professor of Architectural Sculpture at the Sir J.J. School of Art in now Mumbai. And so Rudyard had a curious combination of artistic genes and the governance of the British Empire, from which his flowing ability brought forth the classic stories and adventures and the walking between worlds of the British Empire’s view of native lands, and the reality for a child who had Indian nannies, and direct physical and linguistic communications so early on, severely contrasted with the harsh first placement in England and the view from that Empire power of what a correct education was, the pressure of a university, the right sort of career, all under the Protestant Christian government of the time.
Rudyard Kipling has also been the wrong side of modern sensibilities in his use of rhyme. Now, for a long, long, long time anything that needed to be said, or even just expressed, was best done in rhyme. It sits in the brain and it fits in the brain, and can be remembered again and again, but with the general turn against all things British establishment, and against men in general and especially men associated with past Empire, the structured rhyming poetry is definitely a thing of the past.
However, Rudyard’s childhood and then return to India as a journalist and a part of Indian cultural life, not as a governor or top down power structure, was fully between two worlds, and fully part of both at the same time, as far as one can be. And whether you are in a place through no choice or choice, the place still has the long history of natives and their gods and goddesses. This blog is written from 54′-56’N in Britannia, the name generously given by the Romans to the personification of the warrior goddess, so not any different to Mumbai being returned to the native goddess. Both names happen to be goddesses, which means nothing. All pantheons are made up of the full spectrum of life, and without both gods and goddesses where would anything be?
In Sussex, the English country on the far south of the landmass, Rudyard and his wife bought Bateman’s, and where he lived until his passing in 1936. Just as his life in India was not all good/bad but conveys the complexity within governed geographies and how there is within also much syncretism, communication, understanding, exchanges, so his life in England also. While continuing within political circles, in writing, organisations, political philosophy of events of the day, he wrote “Sussex”. And in “Sussex”, it is very clearly said that in England also, the Christian British Empire has suppressed the native gods and goddesses, and those (of us) who worship them. Ecclesiastical law prevents any archaeology of church sites, but underneath lies the practices of the land, often a well of clear fresh water, on a particular landscape location, in a regional network of others, and under the pantheon of gods who care and guide and protect. It is said that Rudyard communicated with the little people in his garden, who to those of us who live by the olde ways are real people, who do give poems to be conveyed, who do wish for their land back and their humans to be living as humans once did, before the virus of the modern era went mad.
“Sussex” as everyone who knows Sussex well, is actually West Sussex and East Sussex, and Rudyard was in East Sussex. Place speaks and creates and directs and draws circles and links humans in apparently impossible ways, and did once provide the 95% identity of biological humans, merged with geographical. As the British Empire is no longer, and itself has been renamed into the Common-wealth (let’s not go into those two words) which itself is falling apart, and as the government structures of the ‘UK’ government itself is falling apart, still there are many natives in England, Cornwall, Wales, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Manx, Eire, Cumbria, Northumberland, The Borders of Olde, Galloway, Pictland and Caledonia who love their place because their place loves them. It is very sad that those who are natives and a place in these places are now called supremacist, extremist, and all the other names because there are also now many thousands, millions even, whose “place”, “my country” is nowhere in Britannia or Eire but all around the Earth as it spins in space, held in place by Sol and gravity. It is a very sad thing indeed for us natives who believe all humans have a natural right to the “place” can only see this reality in incomers to Britain who speak of “in my country” meaning a land very far from Britain. This blog, despite no doubt being seen as an ignorant xenophobe by lefties, is exactly the opposite, and the pleasure is inestimable when speaking with natives of other lands, even when they live in Britain, of the love for “our place”. Alas it is just one thing that the modern State obscures, that to love “a place” and to speak of our love, is actually the antidote to modern tensions, not the cause.
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