drift, wait and obey: A Kipling Writing Recipe
I trust a moderator here will be able to correct the above misspelling of "Kipling."
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SOVEREIGNTY
When Rudyard Kipling died in January 1936 and his autobiography was published the following year, the Baha’i community of North America was just beginning its first teaching Plan, 1937 to 1944. This poet of British imperialism, the first English language writer and the youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature had died. Some critics denied Kipling’s claim to poethood. His poetic, his literary, aim was to reach out to a very varied audience, to amuse, to entertain, to educate the sensibilities and he had done this as far back as 1892 when he began to emerge as a fully fledged poet. His observation skills, his power of imagination, his inner vision, his unpretentiousness, his idealism and sense of duty, his luminous narrative gift and genius, were all part of a life that, as he himself put it, “he played as it came.” He said his recipe for writing was: "drift, wait and obey.” -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 18 April 2008.:thumbs_up
I, too, drift, wait and obey,
Rudyard, in a different time,
indeed, a different epoch, so
much has happened in those
years since the beginning of
those Plans, since your book,
your published autobiography,
saw the light of day and that
preliminary task1 unfolded
enabling my generation to
fulfil in the course of the
succeeding century the vision
of America’s spiritual destiny.
The empire that was your love
was not to last, as you foresaw,
Rudyard, but the evidences of
an earthly sovereignty had just
begun to be established in this
world, one that would endure
forever, would never perish,
a sovereignty that would
overshadow all the peoples
of the earth thus forsaking
mortal, fleeting sovereignty.2
1 The Seven Year Plan of 1937 to 1944
2 Baha’u’llah, Kitab-i-Aqdas, p.44.
Ron Price
18 April 2008
