living stories

If a person examines three Rudyard Kipling works --
"If";
"Gunga Din";
and
"Riki Tiki Tavi"
they can notice the rhythmic force and lumbering power in the style, evident in all of these works, even "Riki Tiki Ravi" which is not a poem, but prose.

[If]:
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings -- nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much....

------------
[Gunga Din]
When the sweatin' troop-train lay
In a sidin' through the day,
Where the 'eat would make your bloomin' eyebrows crawl,
We shouted "Harry By!"
'Til our throats were bricky-dry,
Then we wopped 'im 'cause 'e
couldn't serve us all.
It was "Din! Din! Din!
"You 'eathen, where the mischief
'ave you been?...

----------- It seems to roll forward, with momentum like the song, "Like A Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan ...

------------------
Riki Tiki Tavi is the name of a mongoose, the natural enemy of snakes, in India. In the story, (from The Jungle Book, a collection of short stories for children), Riki Tiki is rescued by an English family (father, mother, and young son) living in India -- even though there's very little physical description, somehow the reader absorbs the feeling of being in India in colonial times (that's the magic...)

And it is scary, because there are snakes in the garden near the family's bungalow. (Snakes in a garden -- hmmh. An allusion to Garden of Eden? When I experienced the story in childhood, think may have missed allusions -- preoccupied with hiding under bed when snakes came on the page. ...)

And I think now maybe that story is a meditation on nature --
the mongoose, the Nice, or Good, in Nature protects the people from
the snakes -- Nature's bearers of malevolence.

What's the message?
We have to work the good,
watch out for the bad.

And the story discusses motives, in a very elementary way: you feel like the mongoose fights and kills snakes because he wants to protect the nice family; but you realize, at the same time, that the mongoose fights and kills snakes because -- that's what mongooses do.

The reader feels the sentiment & emotion and also has laid on him the truth of nature and life: inexorable fortune and fate.

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