The Gods of the Copybook Headings

Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall, And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

They showed us each in turn That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn: But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind, So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

They never altered their pace, Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place, But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

[4] Kipling's narrative voice contrasts the purported eternal wisdom of these commonplace texts with the fashionable and (in Kipling's view) naïve modern ideas of "the Market-Place", making oblique reference, by way of puns or poetic references to older geological time periods, to Welsh-born Lloyd George and Liberal efforts at disarmament ("the Cambrian measures"), feminism ("the ... Feminian Sandstones"), and socialist policies advocated by trade-unionists, many of whom were coalminers ("the Carboniferous Epoch").

In a footnote to a philosophical essay, Francis Slade compared Kipling's theme to Horace's Epistles I.10 ("The Advantages of Country Life"), in which the Roman poet says:Drive Nature off with a pitchfork, she’ll still press back, And secretly burst in triumph through your sad disdain.

[7] John C. Bogle described the poem as "beautifully captur[ing] the thinking of Schumpeter and Keynes", who espoused, respectively, "entrepreneurship" and "animal spirits": both ideas of the market place.

A page from a 19th-century copybook, in which the printed headings have been copied. The homily is paraphrased from the 17th-century sermon Against Detraction by Isaac Barrow : "Good nature, like a bee, collects honey from every herb. Ill nature, like a spider, sucks poison from the flowers."