"The Mary Gloster" is a poem by British writer Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). It is dated 1894, but seems to have been first published in his 1896 collection The Seven Seas . [1]
It is a deathbed monologue by a wealthy shipowner and shipbuilder, Sir Anthony Gloster, addressed to his only surviving child, his son Dick or Dickie, who does not speak.
The old man speaks urgently to his son, who has spent his money and broken his heart. He knows that he will die tonight, even if his doctor says that he is good for another fortnight. The monologue does not follow an orderly narrative sequence. Increasingly towards the end, the old man repeats himself, and digresses.
He was a ship's master at 22, and married (to Mary) at 23. Now, 50 years later, he has made a million (£ sterling, as of 2017 [update] equivalent to about £120M), has 10,000 on his payroll, has 40 freighters at sea, is a "baronite" (i.e. baronet), [Note 1] has dined with royalty, and the press have called him "not the least of our merchant-princes". He took on jobs which others rejected as too dangerous and, urged on by Mary, saved up enough to buy a half-share in a ship, and then to buy their own ship, the Mary Gloster, the first in his freighter line. Mary died on her, and was buried at sea in the Macassar Straits. He afterwards took to drink; but Mary told him to stop, and he devoted himself to work.
In London, using his savings, he formed a partnership with a man named M'Cullough and set up a ship-repair foundry. It was successful, and they moved to the Clyde to build ships. Business prospered, the freighter line grew, and he was always one step ahead of his competitors. M'Cullough died; he took advantage of what he found in M'Cullough's private papers, and made his fortune.
His son, nearer 40 than 30, has disappointed him. He was educated at "Harrer" (i.e. Harrow School) and Trinity College, is only interested in arts and society, and is married to a woman who Sir Anthony describes in unflattering terms both physically and personally. Their marriage is childless; whereas Mary was continually pregnant, even though only Dickie survived. Sir Anthony calls his son "weak, and a liar, and idle, and mean as a collier's whelp nosing for scraps in the galley". He is leaving Dickie £300,000 (as of 2017 [update] , equivalent to about £37M) in his will –but only the interest from it, the money is tied up in a trust which specifies that it will revert to the business if Dickie dies childless. The wife with her sham tears will hate that. Sir Anthony justifies his affairs with paid women after Mary's death.
Dickie goes to depart, but his father stops him. If Dickie does what he will now be asked to do, he will get £5,000 (as of 2017 [update] , equivalent to about £600,000), in cash. Sir Anthony does not want to be buried in the vault he had bought in Woking at a time when he had hoped to establish a family line. His will may be challenged on the grounds that he was not of sound mind when he made it; only Dickie can defend it. He wants to be buried at sea, in the Macassar Straits, at the same location as Mary. Dickie is to ask the company for the loan of Mary Gloster for a cruise. He is to write to McAndrew, who is Sir Anthony's oldest friend, who works for him, who knew Mary, and who knows his wishes; the company will grant McAndrew leave of absence if Dickie says that this concerns Sir Anthony's business. (Sir Anthony had, after his first stroke, set up arrangements with McAndrew.) The Mary Gloster is to steam to the Macassar Straits, to a place which Sir Anthony has just described and which McAndrew also knows, with the ship in ballast and Sir Anthony's body in the deck cabin. Once the body is over the side, McAndrew will give Dickie the money and land him at Macassar; then (in an act which Mary would have called wasteful), take Mary Gloster out to sea, and scuttle her. [Note 2]
Never seen death yet, Dickie? ... Well, now is your time to learn! [2]
— line 186
The poem consists of 186 lines, in rhyming couplets, typically with six stresses per line. The metre is in large part an irregular mixture of iambuses (.-) and anapaests (..-).
American-born British poet T. S. Eliot included the poem in his 1941 collection A Choice of Kipling's Verse . He thought that it belonged with another dramatic monologue, "McAndrew's Hymn" (1893). He saw both as owing something of a debt to Robert Browning, and as being "metrically and intrinsically ballads". He shared the popular verdict that "McAndrew's Hymn" is the more memorable, but did not find it easy to say why. He found both poems equally successful. The greater memorability may be because there is "greater poetry in the subject matter. It is McAndrew who creates the poetry of Steam [...]". [3] On the other hand, Lord Birkenhead, writing in 1947, considered "The Mary Gloster" to be the more successful of the two. [4] More recently, one writer has seen parallels between "The Mary Gloster" and Swinburne's poetry. [5] More recently still, David Gilmour (2003) has also seen similarities to Browning. [6]
"McAndrew's Hymn" mentions a time when one McAndrew was "Third on the Mary Gloster". "The Mary Gloster" involves a McAndrew who is "Chief of the Maori Line", a "stiff-necked Glasgow beggar", who has prayed for the protagonist's soul, who is incapable of lying or stealing, and who will command the Mary Gloster on its final voyage. The descriptions of the two men are not inconsistent. Internal dating evidence in the two poems (insofar as that can be trusted in works of the imagination) is also not inconsistent.
In 1921, American travel writer E. Alexander Powell wrote, 'Our course took us within sight of "the Little Paternosters, as you come to the Union Bank," where, as you may remember, Sir Anthony Gloster, of Kipling's ballad of The Mary Gloster, was buried beside his wife'. [7] In 2008, British historian John Charmley (not all of whose works are accepted without question) compared Sir Anthony to Conservative Prime Minister Bonar Law and Dickie to his predecessor Arthur Balfour. [8] Later in 2008, British journalist Peter Stothard said that "The Mary Gloster" had been or was a favourite poem both of American writer Mark Twain and of British politician Margaret Thatcher. [9]
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work.
This is a bibliography of works by Rudyard Kipling, including books, short stories, poems, and collections of his works.
"Gunga Din" is an 1890 poem by Rudyard Kipling set in British India. The poem is published along "Mandalay" and "Danny deever" in "Barracks-Room ballads".
A brougham was a light, four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage built in the 19th century. It was named after the politician and jurist Lord Brougham, who had this type of carriage built to his specification by London coachbuilder Robinson & Cook in 1838 or 1839. It had an enclosed body with two doors, like the rear section of a coach; it sat two, sometimes with an extra pair of fold-away seats in the front corners, and with a box seat in front for the driver and a footman or passenger. Unlike a coach, the carriage had a glazed front window, so that the occupants could see forward. The forewheels were capable of turning sharply. A variant, called a brougham-landaulet, had a top collapsible from the rear doors backward.
The Barrack-Room Ballads are a series of songs and poems by Rudyard Kipling, dealing with the late-Victorian British Army and mostly written in a vernacular dialect. The series contains some of Kipling's best-known works, including the poems "Gunga Din", "Tommy", "Mandalay", and "Danny Deever", helping consolidate his early fame as a poet.
"Recessional" is a poem by Rudyard Kipling. It was composed for the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, in 1897.
"Mandalay" is a poem by Rudyard Kipling, written and published in 1890, and first collected in Barrack-Room Ballads, and Other Verses in 1892. The poem is set in colonial Burma, then part of British India. The protagonist is a Cockney working-class soldier, back in grey, restrictive London, recalling the time he felt free and had a Burmese girlfriend, now unattainably far away.
"My Boy Jack" is a 1916 poem by Rudyard Kipling. Kipling wrote it for Jack Cornwell, the 16-year-old youngest recipient of the Victoria Cross, who stayed by his post on board the light cruiser HMS Chester at the Battle of Jutland until he died. Kipling's son John was never referred to as "Jack". The poem echoes the grief of all parents who lost sons in the First World War. John Kipling was a 2nd Lt in the Irish Guards and disappeared in September 1915 during the Battle of Loos in the First World War. The poem was published as a prelude to a story in his book Sea Warfare written about the Battle of Jutland in 1916. The imagery and theme is maritime in nature and as such it is about a generic nautical Jack, though emotionally affected by the death of Kipling's son.
Puck of Pook's Hill is a fantasy book by Rudyard Kipling, published in 1906, containing a series of short stories set in different periods of English history. It can count both as historical fantasy – since some of the stories told of the past have clear magical elements, and as contemporary fantasy – since it depicts a magical being active and practising his magic in the England of the early 1900s when the book was written.
Andrew Michael Duncan Lycett FRSL is an English biographer and journalist.
The Fringes of the Fleet is a booklet written in 1915 by Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). The booklet contains essays and poems about nautical subjects in World War I.
"The Ballad of East and West" is a poem by Rudyard Kipling. It was first published in 1889, and has been much collected and anthologized since.
"The King's Pilgrimage" is a poem and book about the journey made by King George V in May 1922 to visit the World War I cemeteries and memorials being constructed at the time in France and Belgium by the Imperial War Graves Commission. This journey was part of the wider pilgrimage movement that saw tens of thousands of bereaved relatives from the United Kingdom and the Empire visit the battlefields of the Great War in the years that followed the Armistice. The poem was written by the British author and poet Rudyard Kipling, while the text in the book is attributed to the Australian journalist and author Frank Fox. Aspects of the pilgrimage were also described by Kipling within the short story "The Debt" (1930).
"Hymn Before Action" is a poem written by Rudyard Kipling in 1896. It takes the form of a prayer by troops to God and to Mary on the eve of battle.
The Seven Seas is a book of poetry by Rudyard Kipling published 1896. Poems include "Hymn Before Action", "In the Neolithic Age", "The Lost Legion", "The Mary Gloster", and "McAndrew's Hymn".
"Bread upon the Waters" is a short story by Rudyard Kipling, which first appeared in the London Graphic in December 1895. It was later published in The Day's Work (1898). The title derives from Ecclesiastes 11:1 - "Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days". It was originally illustrated by Sir Frank Brangwyn.
"In the Neolithic Age" is a poem by the English writer Rudyard Kipling. It was published in the December 1892 issue of The Idler and in 1896 in his poetry collection The Seven Seas. The poem is the source of the quotation: "There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, / And every single one of them is right."
A Choice of Kipling's Verse, made by T. S. Eliot, with an essay on Rudyard Kipling is a book first published in December 1941. It is in two parts. The first part is an essay by American-born British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), in which he discusses the nature and stature of British poet Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). The second part consists of Eliot's selection from Kipling's poems.
"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.
"McAndrew's Hymn" is a poem by English writer Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). It was begun in 1893, and first published in December 1894 in Scribner's Magazine. It was collected in Kipling's The Seven Seas of 1896. Some editions title the poem "M'Andrew's Hymn".
[T]he two great Browning monologues that Browning did not write –'McAndrew's Hymn' and 'The Mary Gloster'.