Barrack-Room Ballads

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.

A third group of vernacular Army poems from the Boer War, titled "Service Songs" and published in The Five Nations (1903), can be considered part of the Ballads, as can a number of other uncollected pieces.

But, wrote Eliot, Kipling had more to offer than that: he had "a consummate gift of word, phrase, and rhythm", never repeated himself, and used short, simple stanzas and rhyming schemes.

What is more The variety of form which Kipling manages to devise for his ballads is remarkable: each is distinct, and perfectly fitted to the content and the mood which the poem has to convey.