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Danny Deever

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Poetry & Opera

   Rudyard Kipling
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   Rudyard Kipling

   Danny Deever is an 1890 poem by Rudyard Kipling, one of the first of
   the Barrack-Room Ballads. It received wide critical and popular
   acclaim, and is often regarded as one of the most significant pieces of
   Kipling's early verse. The poem, a ballad, describes the execution of a
   British soldier in India for murder. His execution is viewed by his
   regiment, paraded to watch it, and the poem is composed of the comments
   they exchange as they see him hanged.

Context

   The poem was first published on February 22, 1890 in the Scots
   Observer, in America later in the year, and printed as part of the
   Barrack-Room Ballads shortly thereafter.

   It is generally read as being set in India, though it gives no details
   of the actual situation. Some research has suggested that the poem was
   written with a specific incident in mind, the execution of one Private
   Flaxman of The Leicestershire Regiment, at Lucknow in 1887. A number of
   details of this execution correspond to the occasion described by
   Kipling in the poem, and he later used a story similar to that of
   Flaxman's as a basis for the story Black Jack.

   Kipling apparently wrote the various Barrack-Room Ballads in early
   1890, about a year since he had last been in India, and three years
   since Flaxman's execution. Whilst he wrote large amounts of occasional
   verse, he usually added a note beneath the title giving the context of
   the poem. Danny Deever does not have any such notes, whilst "Cleared"
   (a topical poem on the Parnell Commission), written in the same month
   as Danny Deever, does. This suggests that it was not thought by Kipling
   to be inspired by a specific incident, though it is quite possible that
   he remembered the Flaxman case.

Summary

   The form is a dialogue, between a young and inexperienced soldier (or
   soldiers; he is given as "Files-on-Parade", suggesting a group) and a
   more experienced and older NCO ("the Colour-Sergeant"). The setting is
   an execution, generally presumed to be somewhere in India; a soldier,
   one Danny Deever, has been tried and sentenced to death for murdering a
   comrade, and his battalion is paraded to see the hanging. This
   procedure strengthened discipline in the unit, by a process of
   deterrence, and helped inure inexperienced soldiers to the sight of
   death.

   The young soldier is unaware of what is happening, at first - he asks
   why the bugles are blowing, and why the Sergeant looks so pale, but is
   told that Deever is being hanged, and that the regiment is drawn up in
   "[h]ollow square" to see it. He presses the Sergeant further, in the
   second verse - why are people breathing so hard? why are some men
   collapsing? These signs of the effect that watching the hanging has
   upon the men of the regiment are explained away by the Sergeant as
   being due to the cold weather or the bright sun. The voice is
   reassuring, keeping the young soldier calm in the sight of death, just
   as the Sergeant will calm him with his voice in combat. In the third
   verse, Files thinks of Deever, saying that he slept alongside him, and
   drank with him, but the Sergeant reminds him that Deever is now alone,
   that he sleeps "out an' far to-night", and reminds the soldier of the
   magnitude of Deever's crime -

                            For 'e shot a comrade sleepin' -- you must
                            look 'im in the face;
                            Nine 'undred of 'is county an' the regiment's
                            disgrace,

   (Nine hundred was roughly the number of men in a single infantry
   battalion, and as regiments were formed on local lines, most would have
   been from the same county; it is thus emphasised that his crime is a
   black mark against both the regiment, as a whole, and against his
   comrades.) The fourth verse comes to the hanging; Files sees the body
   against the sun, and then feels his soul as it "whimpers" overhead; the
   term reflects a shudder in the ranks as they watch Deever die. Finally,
   the Sergeant moves the men away - whilst it is not directly mentioned
   in the poem, they would be marched past the corpse on the gallows -
   reflecting that the recruits are shaking after their ordeal, and that
   "they'll want their beer to-day".

Structure

   The poem is composed of four eight-line verses, containing a dialogue
   between two (or three) voices:

                "What are the bugles blowin' for?" said Files-on-Parade.
                "To turn you out, to turn you out", the Colour-Sergeant
                said.
                "What makes you look so white, so white?" said
                Files-on-Parade.
                "I'm dreadin' what I've got to watch", the Colour-Sergeant
                said.

                            For they're hangin' Danny Deever, you can hear
                            the Dead March play,
                            The regiment's in 'ollow square -- they're
                            hangin' him to-day;
                            They've taken of his buttons off an' cut his
                            stripes away,
                            An' they're hangin' Danny Deever in the
                            mornin'.

   It is immediately noticeable that the poem is written in a vernacular
   English. Whilst the Barrack-Room Ballads have made this appear a common
   feature of Kipling's work, at the time it was quite unusual; this was
   the first of his published works to be written in the voice of the
   common soldier. Whilst the speech is not a direct representation of any
   single dialect, it serves to give a very clear effect of a working
   class English voice of the period. Note the "taken of his buttons off",
   a deliberate error, to add to the stylised speech; it refers to the
   ceremony of military degradation, where the man to be executed is
   formally stripped of any marks of rank, such as his stripes, or of
   significant parts of his uniform.

   The four verses each consist of two questions asked by "Files" and
   answered by the Sergeant- a call-and-response form - and then another
   four lines of the Sergeant explaining, as above. In some
   interpretations, the second four lines are taken to be spoken by a
   third voice, another "file-on-parade". These verses are strongly
   rhythmic - the first four lines always ending with the same words, and
   the latter three with an aaab rhyme scheme - which serves to reinforce
   the idea of drilling infantry by giving the effect of marching feet.
   Eliot noted the imperfect rhyme scheme - parade and said do not quite
   rhyme - as strongly contibuting to this effect, with the slight
   interruption supporting the feel of a large number of men marching
   together, not quite in harmony.

Critical reaction

   Danny Deever is often seen as one of Kipling's most powerful early
   works, and was greeted with acclaim when first published being the
   subject of a (favourable) article in the Times within a month; David
   Masson, a professor of literature at the University of Edinburgh, is
   often reported (perhaps apocryphally) to have waved the magazine in
   which it appeared at his students, crying "Here's literature! Here's
   literature at last!". William Henley, the editor of the Scots Observer,
   is even said to have danced on his wooden leg when he first received
   the text.

   It was later commented on by William Butler Yeats, who noted that
   "[Kipling] interests a critical audience today by the grotesque tragedy
   of Danny Deever". T. S. Eliot called the poem "technically (as well as
   in content) remarkable", holding it up as one of the best of Kipling's
   ballads. Both Yeats and Eliot were writing shortly after Kipling's
   death, in 1936 and 1941, when critical opinion of his poetry was at a
   low point; both, nonetheless, drew out Danny Deever for attention as a
   significant work.

   An example of that low critical opinion is a 1942 essay by George
   Orwell, which referred to Danny Deever as an example of Kipling "at his
   worst, and also his most vital ... almost a shameful pleasure, like the
   taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle
   life". He felt the work was an example of what he described as "good
   bad poetry"; verse which is essentially vulgar, yet continues to be
   read for pleasure.

Music

   The Barrack-Room Ballads, as the name suggests, are songs of soldiers.
   Whilst written by Kipling, they share a form and a style with
   traditional Army songs. Kipling was one of the first to pay attention
   to these works; Carrington noted that in contrast to the songs of
   sailors, "no-one had thought of collecting genuine soldiers' songs, and
   when Kipling write in this traditional style it was not recognised as
   traditional". Kipling himself was fond of singing his poetry, of
   writing it to fit the rhythm of a particular tune. In this specific
   case, the musical source has been suggested as the Army's "grotesque
   bawdy song" Barnacle Bill the Sailor, but it is possible that some
   other popular tune of the period was used.

   However, the ballads were not published with any music, and whilst it
   was quickly adapted to be sung, new musical settings were written; a
   musical setting by Walter Damrosch was described as "Teddy Roosevelt's
   favourite song", and is sometimes encountered on its own as a tune
   entitled They're Hanging Danny Deever In The Morning. To date, at least
   a dozen published recordings are known, made from 1893 to 1985.

   The tune "They're Hanging Danny Deever in the Morning" was played from
   the Campanile at UC Berkeley at the end of the last day of classes for
   the Spring Semester of 1930. That tune was requested on the last day of
   classes for the following semester. Playing this tune on the last day
   of classes is one of the oldest UC Berkeley campus traditions. It
   begins a period of silence for the Campanile lasting until the end of
   exams for the semester.
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