Mandalay (poem)
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.
Other critics have identified a variety of themes in the poem, including exotic erotica, Victorian prudishness, romanticism, class, power, and gender.
He had taken an eastward route home, travelling by steamship from Calcutta to Japan, then to San Francisco, then across the United States, in company with his friends Alex and "Ted" (Edmonia) Hill.
The poem's ending closely echoes its beginning, again in the circular manner of a traditional ballad, making it convenient to memorise, to recite, and to sing.
The last foot is catalectic, consisting only of the stressed syllable:[10][11] Ship me / somewheres / east of / Suez, / where the / best is / like the / worst,Where there / aren't no / Ten Com/mandments / an' a / man can / raise a / thirst;For the / temple/-bells are / callin', / and it's / there that / I would / be—By the / old Moul/mein Pa/goda, / looking / lazy / at the / sea.In Kipling's time, the poem's metre and rhythm were admired; in The Art of Verse Making (1915), Modeste Hannis Jordan wrote: "Kipling has a wonderful 'ear' for metre, for rhythm.
[12] The poet and critic T. S. Eliot, writing in 1941, called the variety of forms Kipling devised for his ballads "remarkable: each is distinct, and perfectly fitted to the content and the mood which the poem has to convey.
[9] She argued that Kipling "cued the Victorian reader to see it as a 'song of the Empire'" by putting it in the "border ballad" song tradition, where fighting men sang of their own deeds, lending it emotional weight.
[9] Hamilton sees the fact that the girl was named Supayalat, "jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen", as a sign that Kipling meant that winning her mirrored the British overthrow of the Burmese monarchy.
[14] Andrew Selth commented of Hamilton's analysis that "It is debatable whether any of Kipling's contemporaries, or indeed many people since, saw the ballad in such esoteric terms, but even so it met with an enthusiastic reception.
[17] A similar point was made by the political scientist Igor Burnashov in an article for the Kipling Society, where he writes that "the moving love of the Burmese girl and British soldier is described in a picturesque way.
The fact that the Burmese girl represented the inferior and the British soldier superior races is secondary, because Kipling makes here a stress on human but not imperial relations.
[9] Hamilton argued that, in the manner of music hall songs, Kipling contrasts the exotic of the "neater, sweeter maiden" with the mundane, mentioning the "beefy face an' grubby 'and" of the British "'ousemaids".
"[19] He notes that the poem provides a romantic trigger, not accurate geography; that the name Mandalay has a "falling cadence ... the lovely word has gathered about itself the chiaroscuro of romance."
'The literary critic Steven Moore wrote that in the "once-popular" poem, the lower-class Cockney soldier extols the tropical paradise of Burma, drawn both to an exotic lover and to a state of "lawless freedom" without the "Ten Commandments".
He argued that the poem's 51 lines cover "race, class, power, gender, the erotic, the exotic and what anthropologists and historians call 'colonial desire'.
The ballad style "lent itself easily to parody and adaption", resulting in half-a-dozen soldiers' songs, starting as early as the 1896 campaign in Sudan:[14]
By the old Soudani Railway, looking southward from the sea,There's a camel sits a'swearin' – and, worse luck, belongs to me:I hate the shadeless palm-tree, but the telegraphs they say,'Get you on, you 'Gippy soldier, get you on to Dongolay.
[23] Bertolt Brecht referred to Kipling's poem in his Mandalay Song, which was set to music by Kurt Weill for Happy End and Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.
