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Post by Sediba on Feb 28, 2018 22:07:11 GMT 10
The Green Eye Of The Little Yellow God
There's a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There's a little marble cross below the town;
There's a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.
He was known as "Mad Carew" by the subs at Khatmandu,
He was hotter than they felt inclined to tell;
But for all his foolish pranks, he was worshipped in the ranks,
And the Colonel's daughter smiled on him as well.
He had loved her all along, with a passion of the strong,
The fact that she loved him was plain to all.
She was nearly twenty-one and arrangements had begun
To celebrate her birthday with a ball.
He wrote to ask what present she would like from Mad Carew;
They met next day as he dismissed a squad;
And jestingly she told him then that nothing else would do
But the green eye of the little Yellow God.
On the night before the dance, Mad Carew seemed in a trance,
And they chaffed him as they puffed at their cigars:
But for once he failed to smile, and he sat alone awhile,
Then went out into the night beneath the stars.
He returned before the dawn, with his shirt and tunic torn,
And a gash across his temple dripping red;
He was patched up right away, and he slept through all the day,
And the Colonel's daughter watched beside his bed.
He woke at last and asked if they could send his tunic through;
She brought it, and he thanked her with a nod;
He bade her search the pocket saying "That's from Mad Carew,"
And she found the little green eye of the god.
She upbraided poor Carew in the way that women do,
Though both her eyes were strangely hot and wet;
But she wouldn't take the stone and Mad Carew was left alone
With the jewel that he'd chanced his life to get.
When the ball was at its height, on that still and tropic night,
She thought of him and hurried to his room;
As she crossed the barrack square she could hear the dreamy air
Of a waltz tune softly stealing thro' the gloom.
His door was open wide, with silver moonlight shining through;
The place was wet and slipp'ry where she trod;
An ugly knife lay buried in the heart of Mad Carew,
'Twas the "Vengeance of the Little Yellow God."
There's a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There's a little marble cross below the town;
There's a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.
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Post by madametarot on Mar 4, 2018 21:07:16 GMT 10
A lot of work Greg and you found all the rhyming words and a beat as well. The unjust consequence of love is well documented.
Congratz.
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Post by Sediba on Mar 5, 2018 18:40:19 GMT 10
A lot of work Greg and you found all the rhyming words and a beat as well. The unjust consequence of love is well documented. Congratz. Oooops .... I should have attributed that ... J M Hayes? |
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Post by madametarot on Mar 6, 2018 9:43:53 GMT 10
No worries Greg my comments remain no matter who the author was. But maybe not the congratz.
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Post by epictetus on Mar 19, 2018 12:23:20 GMT 10
I'd always thought the poem was by Kipling, but I have learnt that he was simply an "influence". Carew was both very stupid and incredibly insensitive to try and deface a religious image in this way. He deserved what he got. The British were not generally disrespectful of India's religious images. In fact, much of the credit for what we know of India's cultural heritage we owe to the British orientalists (despite Edward Said's calumnies which, if they have validity, have it in regard to the Arab world). The pandits had been marginalised and the knowledge was not being passed on. The British Army were never posted to Nepal. They stayed in India except for officers in Gurkha regiments. The "little marble cross below the town" brought to my mind the little colonial church of St John in the Wilderness just below McLeod Ganj in Upper Dharamshala, Northern India. Though still in use - a priest from the Diocese of Amritsar conducts services at regular times - the church is really just a monument. Lord Elgin (Viceroy of India 1861-63) is buried in the churchyard. A visit to the church and its many plaques and gravestones takes one back to the atmosphere of the Raj. Many British expats died young in those days. ![]() |
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Post by epictetus on Mar 19, 2018 12:29:41 GMT 10
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Post by Stray Pup on Mar 19, 2018 15:31:38 GMT 10
Carew was both very stupid and incredibly insensitive to try and deface a religious image in this way. He deserved what he got. Colonialism was stupid and insensitive? Mountbatten deserved what he got. |
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Post by Stray Pup on Mar 19, 2018 15:34:20 GMT 10
An I wouldn't trust Kipling on anything. I don't think he ever got India, did he?
On the road to Mandalay he has 'China across the bay'
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Post by epictetus on Mar 19, 2018 17:31:21 GMT 10
An I wouldn't trust Kipling on anything. I don't think he ever got India, did he? On the road to Mandalay he has 'China across the bay' And Epictetus says:"An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay" .... I think it should be read as [An' the dawn comes up] ... [like thunder outer China] ... ['crost the Bay] Mandalay is only 400 km from the Chinese border, but there's no "bay" nearby. The nearest would be the Gulf of Martaban where the Irawaddy flows into the sea. Kipling has been branded because of his identification with the Raj, but I think he had good insight. "Kim" to me is a very good story and is grounded in the experience of living in that polyethnic and multi-religious place and time. Of course it's written from an Anglocentric perspective - Kipling was an Englishman after all - but it is by no means racialist in any meaningful sense of the term. It does not take on, for example, Conrad's presumption of British and European superiority. For a good defence of the Orientalists see Ibn Warraq, Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism, Prometheus Books, 2007. There are others I could recommend as well. Edward Said did a great disservice to students of India, and his dubious theses have been taken up by Hindu Nationalists ( Hindutva - Fascists), who managed to get Penguin's print of Wendy Doniger's groundbreaking The Hindus: An Alternative History, recalled in India in 2014. |
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Post by Sediba on Mar 19, 2018 21:57:44 GMT 10
I think his biography was held back for years by his wife's refusal to allow access to papers or permission. Angus Wilson wrote a biography an I gunna try and get a copy.
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Post by epictetus on Mar 20, 2018 9:20:12 GMT 10
I think his biography was held back for years by his wife's refusal to allow access to papers or permission. Angus Wilson wrote a biography an I gunna try and get a copy. Are you thinking of Sir Richard Burton, whose wife, Isabel, burned many documents after he died? I'm not aware of Kipling's widow suppressing papers, though his daughter censured the "official" biography. There's a more recent biography of Kipling (2007) by Charles Allen who has written a lot about the Raj and the Orientalists: Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling, Abacus, 2007. I think I'll try to get this. As an unashamed orientalist myself, I was quite excited to visit, as part of a tour last year of Buddhist sacred sites, the Ashokan pillar at Vaishali. It is one of the five remaining pillars with the lion capital intact, the rest being destroyed by the Muslim invaders or just collapsing. For me it was quite a moving experience.
Bonfire of the ManuscriptsFor years Isabel Burton has been reviled by scholars and admirers of Sir Richard Francis Burton for allegedly burning her husband's diaries, papers, and manuscripts following his death on October 20, 1890. The image of Isabel, grief-stricken and desperate to purge her husband's workroom of sinful and scandalous manuscripts, was so deliciously romantic and horrifying that no one stopped to ask: what exactly did Isabel burn, and why?No one, that is, until Mary S. Lovell. In her book A Rage to Live, Lovell disputes the commonly held belief that Isabel, in a fit of posthumous prudishness, made a great bonfire of her husband's unpublished papers. In the manner of a detective re-opening an old file, Lovell questions the accuracy of (and motivation behind) statements made by witnesses to "the widow's burning" and looks for new evidence in the case.It is widely acknowledged by many scholars that Isabel spent 16 days sorting through and organizing the mountains of papers, books, and manuscripts that she and Richard had accumulated over several years in Trieste. Similarly, it is well documented that Richard left Isabel clear instructions regarding the destruction of his personal papers. Lovell points out that this was not the first time that Richard had asked Isabel to destroy his notes and papers. In fact, Isabel had been responsible for burning Richard's notes and letters on a number of occasions, notably when Richard left his consular positions in Brazil and Damascus.If we equate Isabel's burning of Richard's documents with the modern practice of shredding old paperwork, her actions seem completely normal. They seem even more normal when you consider just how many papers, bills, letters, unfinished manuscripts, books, diaries, and scribbled notes that Richard had collected and produced during his consular tenure at Trieste. Lovell observes that Richard had 8,000 books in his personal library and that, in total, Isabel shipped 200 crates of books and papers from Trieste to England. Isabel was a practical woman, and it is patently ridiculous to expect that she would preserve every scrap of paper or book that Richard owned.Doubts about Isabel's motivations and actions are not easily set aside, however. The heart of the controversy can be summed up in one question: what exactly did Isabel burn?It is well documented that Isabel burned old paperwork, bills, and letters that were related to Richard's consular duties. She also burned her own manuscript The Sixth Sense and numerous personal papers. (Many people ignore the fact that Isabel was an accomplished author, with several published articles and manuscripts to her credit.) After Isabel finished burning the documents that she felt had no value, she pondered what to do with Richard's more important work and, in particular, what to do with The Scented Garden.The Scented Garden was an unpublished manuscript that Richard had worked on almost to the day of his death. The Scented Garden was a new translation of The Perfumed Garden, a work of erotica that was originally published in French as Le Jardin Perfume. After some searching, Richard discovered a complete Arabic version of The Perfumed Garden, which he used to create The Scented Garden. Publishers had already received close to 1,500 orders for the new book; proof that Richard Burton's translations of eastern erotica were wildly popular.There is no doubt that Isabel burned all copies of The Scented Garden. In his book Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, Edward Rice savours the idea that Isabel was horrified by the sexual acts described so explicitly in the manuscript and wanted to destroy it to save Richard's (and her) reputation. He also recounts how Richard appeared before Isabel as an apparition, ordering her to burn the unpublished manuscript on three separate occasions. He concludes that Isabel had no choice except to burn The Scented Garden, which she accomplished by feeding the manuscript into the fire, page by page.Lovell's account of what happened to The Scented Garden is straightforward and far less sensational than Rice's. Isabel received an offer of ?3,000 for The Scented Garden. At this point Isabel had not read the manuscript, although she knew much about its contents from talking to Richard. It was not until she received a counter-offer of ?6,000 that Isabel decided it was time to read Richard's last manuscript.Lovell contends that Isabel was not horrified by the contents of The Scented Garden; rather, she felt that without Richard alive to defend his writing (as he invariably had to do) the sensational nature of the material would outstrip its academic purpose, and "It would, by degrees, descend amongst the populace of Holywell Street" (a street where vendors sold pornography). Furthermore, Isabel felt that The Scented Garden was a low-quality translation, the poorest example of Richard's work. Unlike Rice, Lovell places the burden of choice (to burn or not to burn?) squarely on Isabel's pragmatic shoulders. As we already know, even with an eye-popping offer of ?6,000 for the manuscript, Isabel chose to burn it.So, what exactly did the world lose when Isabel burned The Scented Garden? Rice provides the best answer to this question. Only three people knew the contents of The Scented Garden: Isabel, the typist Mrs. Maylor, and Grenville Baker, a friend of the Burton's who spent many days discussing the work with Richard. Baker shared his opinions with author Norman Penzer, who published excerpts of these conversations in 1923. Baker felt that The Scented Garden was "merely a greatly annotated edition" of the previously published The Perfumed Garden. He felt that it also included a lot of old material from The Arabian Nights. Despite his personal abhorrence of Isabel's decision to burn the manuscript, Penzer concluded, "the work was one which would only have been of value to a small circle of genuine scholars of the East."Rice is far more critical of Isabel for burning Richard's other manuscripts and, like many others, upholds the belief that Isabel burned many of her husband's diaries. He claims that only "some small notebooks and a few other fragments" were saved from the library in Trieste. Lovell argues that many of Richard's papers were burned, but not by Isabel. "We can be sure of this," Lovell writes, "because she painstakingly wrote out an inventory of the contents of the boxes she packed at Trieste, and this surviving document can be compared with a similar inventory made six years later, after Isabel's death, by her secretary."More at: forum.quoteland.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/2911947895/m/298195404 |
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Post by Sediba on Mar 20, 2018 12:31:25 GMT 10
It may have been Kipling's daughter that caused all the problems. There have been many biographies of Kipling, but (in my opinion) Angus Wilson was the best qualified to write it. Richard Burton's biography I have, as well as his complete translation of the One thousand nights and one. (Around 20 volumes) There is no doubt at all that Isabel burnt his manuscripts. It took a number of days. She was a very very jealous woman. Most of the 'books' he translated after 'the Nights' was little more than mild pornography. He had become an old deviant and his mates (who were involved in the publications) were crude pornographers ... I find little merit in those books. But the Nights is an oral history of the people in what was the most advanced civilisation of it's era. it's a wonderful thing that allows you to glimpse, to experience a lost world. A world barely comprehensible today. My own opinion of Burton was that he was a glory hunting fool. And Speke's suicide I lay at his door.  |
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Post by mipela on Mar 21, 2018 16:37:55 GMT 10
An I wouldn't trust Kipling on anything. I don't think he ever got India, did he? On the road to Mandalay he has 'China across the bay' |
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Post by mipela on Mar 21, 2018 16:46:13 GMT 10
Stray Pup,
I'm not happy with your comments here. For myself, I am totally enamoured with all of Kipling's work.
He didn't "get" India you say. Maybe.
I have quite a collection of Kipling's work and to me, he painted pictures for us of the India he saw and experienced.
We "Colonials" are the richer for reading the works of Kipling.
I may be misguided but to my mind, regarding showing us India and it's people, he has no peer.
Mipela
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Post by Sediba on Mar 23, 2018 23:12:15 GMT 10
Stray Pup, I'm not happy with your comments here. I'll stand corrected for the moment, I don't really know a great deal about him. But I do know the problems Angus Wilson had writing his biography, cuz I have Angus Wilson's biography. But I've been to Mandalay and it is no where near any bay. 400kms to the nearest coast line to the west, and towards China, easily over 1000km to the nearest bay in Hanoi, Vietnam. So whatever he meant when he said, 'out of China, across the bay' seems to indicate he had no idea where Mandalay actually is. When I said he didn't 'get India' I left out the 'to', a typo. I meant to say, did he ever get to India. a kinda joke, given his geographic abilities. But I have never read any of his books. By the way Mip, this is Sediba, Stray Pup is just a sock puppet I use to test changes I make on the forum. But I forget when I'm logged in as him and make posts accidentally |
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Post by mipela on Dec 30, 2019 16:24:22 GMT 10
An I wouldn't trust Kipling on anything. I don't think he ever got India, did he? On the road to Mandalay he has 'China across the bay' |
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Post by mipela on Dec 30, 2019 16:40:19 GMT 10
Stray Pup, "Guest",
If you're still around today, I recommend two things:
1. You pay attention to the words of Epictetus and absorb what he has to say - on any subject.
2. You get your favourite body down to your local library and swot up on the history of the British Empire so's you can quote with accuracy and sincerity.
For the rest of you fellow Campfire Yarns fellers, look up Kipling's neat little poem entitled "The Betrothed", circa 1885.
There won't be a man among you who will then see fit to ignore Kipling.
Mipela (back from extended R & R)
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Post by cster on Dec 30, 2019 18:11:27 GMT 10
Welcome back Mipela.
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Post by Pedro on Dec 31, 2019 5:02:40 GMT 10
Sorry, Epic, I am quoting on WHAT you quoted 2 or 6 years ago on this POST:
++++ It is widely acknowledged by many scholars that Isabel spent 16 days sorting through and organizing the mountains of papers, books, and manuscripts that she and Richard had accumulated over several years in Trieste. Similarly, it is well documented that Richard left Isabel clear instructions regarding the destruction of his personal papers. Lovell points out that this was not the first time that Richard had asked Isabel to destroy his notes and papers. In fact, Isabel had been responsible for burning Richard's notes and letters on a number of occasions, notably when Richard left his consular positions in Brazil and Damascus.
If we equate Isabel's burning of Richard's documents with the modern practice of shredding old paperwork, her actions seem completely normal. They seem even more normal when you consider just how many papers, bills, letters, unfinished manuscripts, books, diaries, and scribbled notes that Richard had collected and produced during his consular tenure at Trieste. Lovell observes that Richard had 8,000 books in his personal library and that, in total, Isabel shipped 200 crates of books and papers from Trieste to England. Isabel was a practical woman, and it is patently ridiculous to expect that she would preserve every scrap of paper or book that Richard owned.++++++++++
There are a FEW discrepancies on the above COPY & GLUE!! My uncle Giuseppe Crapuccioni, was the Trusted Maggiordomo of Richard and Isabel when they were living UP in/to Trieste!
1) Isabel spent 16 MONTHS sorting the 2 tons of papers/books accumulated by Richard ( Riccardo in Trieste!)
2) Richard had 6000 books AND Isabel had 1560 books that she collected from the Books markets of Brazil!
3) Isabel preserved (and dumped behind the Altar of the local Church!) EVERY paper strip & scrap & crap that Richard collected AND signed as HIS work!
Keep up the GOOD work AND produce/posts that enrich OUR knowledge!
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at least something to watch for the day of drizzle. 