I loathe Rudyard Kipling for the obvious reasons, yet I’ve read “They” four or five times since 2004, & I’m increasingly fascinated by Adam Nicholson’s narrative (in Perch Hill) of Kipling at Bateman’s. I’m trying to understand what I might be hearing–or what, at least, I might be trying to listen for–under the sentimentality & bad poetry.

You should never ignore a prompt like that, even–or especially–when you have no idea what it’s trying to tell you.

first published July 2008