Gunga Din

“The Ballad of East and West” by Rudyard Kipling (1889)

This poem appeared in the same popular 1890 collection. Like “Gunga Din,” this is a ballad—a narrative of an English officer bonding with an Afghan outlaw after seeing the courage and nobility of the rebel fighting the British occupation.  

“During Wind and Rain” by Thomas Hardy (1917)

A contemporary of Kipling, Hardy also experimented with reinvigorating the ballad genre’s rhythm and rhyme patterns and the use of the verse/refrain. Hardy’s narratives are bleaker than Kipling’s: This ballad explores the death of Hardy’s young wife, concluding that everyone must die and that time never stops. 

“The Hero” by Siegfried Sassoon (1917)

Because Kipling was the most widely read British poet in the years leading up to World War I, British poets of the next generation often acknowledge a debt to Kipling’s themes and prosody. This ballad, in which an Army officer lies to the grieving mother of a dead soldier about his cowardly death under fire, echoes Kipling’s perception that war was brutal and messy and should not be glorified.