Can we say this of Mr Kipling’s poetry?  Is Mr Kipling’s poetry the result of an urgent need for a metrical utterance?

A careful reading of Mr Kipling’s verse, comparing it subject for subject with his prose, soon convinces us that, far from being a more direct passionate and living utterance than his prose, it is invariably more wrought and careful and elaborate.  It does not suggest the poet driven into song.  It suggests rather the skilful writer borrowing the manner of a poet, playing, as it were, with the poet’s tools, without any urgent impulse to express himself in that particular way.  He has merely added to the number of rules to be successfully observed.  Of his technical success there is seldom any doubt at all.  For a craftsman who can use all the intricate resources of good prose successfully to create an illusion that he is inspired in his least abandoned moments, it is child’s play to use the more obvious devices of the metrician to similar effect.  So far as mere formal excellence is concerned, verse is a journeyman’s matter as compared with prose; and it is not at all astonishing to find that the formal part of poetry troubles Mr Kipling not at all.  But we must look beyond the formality of verse to find a poet.  Poetry flies higher than prose only when the poet’s feeling has driven him to sing what he cannot say.  Mr Kipling is a wonderful metrician; but that is not the question.  The question is, Where shall we find the most immediate union of the author’s feeling with the author’s expression?  And the answer to that will be, Not in the author’s poems.

Take as an example the English motive: 

  “See you our little mill that clacks,
    So busy by the brook? 
  She has ground her corn and paid her tax
    Ever since Domesday Book.”

Compare this well-wrought stanza with the prose tale Below the Mill Dam, or with the passage it paraphrases in the story to which it stands as motto: 

“The English are a bold people.  His Saxons would laugh and jest with Hugh, and Hugh with them, and—­this was marvellous to me—­if even the meanest of them said such and such a thing was the Custom of the Manor, then straightway would Hugh and such old men of the Manor as might be near forsake everything else to debate the matter—­I have seen them stop the mill with the corn half ground—­and if the custom or usage were proven to be as it was said, why, that was the end of it, even though it were flat against Hugh, his wish and command.”

It may be said of the verse that, possibly, it is more carefully considered than the prose, more deliberate and formally more excellent.  But it is certainly more remote from the passion it conveys.  There is more drive in a single fragment of_ An Habitation Enforced_ than in all the songs of Puck.