But as the faithful years return
And hearts unwounded sing again,
Comes Taffy dancing through the fern
To lead the Surrey spring again.
Rudyard Kipling. In
Just So Stories for Little Children, 1902.
All the stories in
this book are addressed to "O Best Beloved". Two are about Tegumai (a Neolithic man) and his daughter Taffimai:
"How the first letter was written" and
"How the alphabet was made". Each story in the book is followed by a poem. The poems following these stories form a sequence, and are presented together
on this site. Today's quotation is from the poem that follows the second story.
Of all the Tribe of Tegumai
Who cut that figure, none remain,--
On Merrow Down the cuckoos cry--
The silence and the sun remain.
But as the faithful years return
And hearts unwounded sing again,
Comes Taffy dancing through the fern
To lead the Surrey spring again.
Her brows are bound with bracken-fronds,
And golden elf-locks fly above;
Her eyes are bright as diamonds
And bluer than the sky above.
In moccasins and deer-skin cloak,
Unfearing, free and fair she flits,
And lights her little damp-wood smoke
To show her Daddy where she flits.
For far--oh, very far behind,
So far she cannot call to him,
Comes Tegumai alone to find
The daughter that was all to him!
I read this poem and almost cried at Kipling seeking his lost child; it was as plain to me as if painted or spoken. I tried to research it... and found a paper by an idiotic college student who had read every word the man ever wrote, and had understood none of it. Didn't make this connection, and observed that the prose of
"The Sing-song of Old Man Kangaroo" had "almost a sing-songy quality to it" (owtte).
Yes, Kipling dearly loved his first child, Josephine, who died of pneumonia about age 7. (WP:
1892 -
1899)
I love my daughter, too. Thank God she's alive and well.
dunkelpig doesn't want me to recite this poem: it'll make her cry-- so I stopped. Out loud.