my boy jack book summary Rudyard Kipling: Poems Study Guide. Although Kipling is perhaps most famous for his short stories like "The Jungle Book," he was just as famed for his verse as his prose. His work, which is staggering in number, consists of such major poems as "If", "The White Man's Burden", "The Ballad of East and West", "Gunga Din", "Mandalay", and "Danny Deever". He wrote poetry throughout his life and published in newspapers, magazines, and collections and anthologies. Kipling's reputation has shifted throughout the years; more contemporary readers and scholars find many of his poems difficult to love or respect due to their embrace and sometimes-promulgation of the imperialist, racist, and misogynistic attitudes that prevailed during the day. However, during his own time he garnered more respect and a great deal of popularity. T.S. Eliot wrote of him: "[He had] an immense gift for using words, an amazing curiosity and power of observation with his mind and with all his senses, the mask of the entertainer, and beyond that a queer gift of second sight, of transmitting messages from elsewhere, a gift so disconcerting when we are made aware of it that thenceforth we are never sure when it is not present: all this makes Kipling a writer impossible wholly to understand and quite impossible to belittle." One of Britain's most famous writers, E.M. Forster, took up the subject of Kipling's poetry in a very insightful 1909 lecture. He began by expressing the assumption that Kipling was dull and vulgar, and countered that with his own perspective that "putty, brass and paint are there, but with them is fused, at times inextricably, a precious metal." Forster saw Kipling as very much "alive" and lauded him for this. He separated the poems into five general categories: poems in narrative form, poems relating to military matters, poems inspired by his time in India, poems about imperialism, and poems about childhood. The poems in narrative form include "The Ballad of East and West", "Tomlinson", and "Mary Gloster". They are some of his greatest work and usually stand alone (i.e., they were not included in collections). They are easy to read and comprehend and express large and universal themes. They are also, as Forster writes, "inspired by passion". The military poems, like "Tommy", "Danny Deever", and "Gentlemen-Rankers", are lively, bold, and vulgar. They are mostly contained in Barrack-Room Ballads, and Other Verses . Forster writes that they are "best when they are simplest and are expressing the lively good humour of simple men. How perfectly Kipling knows his business here." The works about India are less famous and tend to be less successful. They are heavily inspired by Kipling's youth in India. However, in India Kipling felt the greatest stirrings of religion he would experience; "Recessional" can be grouped in this period. The poems of imperialism, like "The White Man's Burden", can be more problematic and have a "hardness of touch". Forster comments "An Empire is a very difficult subject for poetry. Unless the poet possesses quite exquisite taste and deep inspiration, he will fall into Kipling's error, and praise it because it is big and can smash up its enemies." This is precisely why many of Kipling's poems, and in some ways, the poet himself, have been discredited. Finally, the poems about childhood are some of Kipling's most charming and gracious, and in them the poet seems most comfortable. Kipling's poetry collections include: Schoolboy Lyrics (1881); Echoes (1884); Departmental Ditties (1886), Barrack-Room Ballads (1890); The Seven Seas (1896); An Almanac of Twelve Sports (1898); The Five Nations (1903); Collected Verse (1907); Songs from Books (1912); and The Years Between (1919). A Minister’s Troubled Son Takes Center Stage in Marilynne Robinson’s ‘Jack’ When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. The good news about “Jack,” the fourth in Marilynne Robinson’s series of novels about the residents of the small town of Gilead, Iowa, is announced in its title. John Ames “Jack” Boughton, the miscreant son of the town’s Presbyterian minister, is among the more memorable characters in recent American literature. We’ve met him before in these novels. (The previous ones are “Gilead,” “Home” and “Lila.”) He’s a welcome disturber of the peace. Come on in, Jack. Robinson’s latest follows him to St. Louis in the years after World War II. No longer young, his hair thinning, he drinks and can’t keep a job. He’s been in prison for a crime he didn’t commit but easily could have. He sleeps in boardinghouses and sometimes rough, in the local cemetery. He retains an almost decent suit of clothes, however, and a certain seedy charm. He picks up a nickname he dislikes: Slick. Jack meets and falls in love with Della Miles, a high school teacher and also the child of a minister. Della is Black. Her father despises Jack. This is the era of Jim Crow and strictly enforced miscegenation laws, a milieu Robinson evokes with small, deft strokes. Their love, as readers of “Gilead,” which also touches on this story, are aware, is likely doomed. But then, with Jack, everything is doomed, all the time. We know this because he and the author tell us so at every opportunity. When Jack opens his mouth, he tends to say the same six or seven things, as if Robinson were pulling a string in his back. “I’m a bum.” “I’m an unsavory character.” “I ruin things.” “You could think of me as a thief.” “Within five minutes I’ll have come up with a way to disillusion you.” “I might not reflect well on you.” “You’re involving yourself with a ne’er-do-well.” And most dramatically, he thinks to himself: “I am the Prince of Darkness.” He’s self-plastered with poison labels, a linguistic crown of thorns. If Jack is Satan (he’s not — we’re meant to see the decency in him, too), he’s a sad-sack Satan. He resembles the brawling and sardonic Randle McMurphy in Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” played by Jack Nicholson in the movie, after the lobotomy. This is probably the place to say that, like a lot of readers I know, I’m divided about Robinson’s novels. On the one hand, there’s “Gilead,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 and which patiently accrues grace and power. On the other hand, to open her other novels, including this one, is largely to enter a remote, airless, life-denying, vaguely pretentious and mostly humorless universe, where it is always Sunday morning and never Saturday night, where the same bespoke arguments about religious feeling are rehashed, where a lonely reader enters, sniffs the penitential air and asks: Who died? Jack is a charmer who is seldom allowed to charm. We’re told he plays barrelhouse piano in bars, that he cuts loose on payday, that he’s a gifted and inveterate criminal. His motto might be carpe noctem. Yet we’re not allowed to see whatever jubilation he finds on the night side of life. He’s a moth, ostensibly drawn to flame, yet rigid because there’s a pin through his thorax. We witness only the hangover, moral and otherwise, the downcast eyes on the morning after. In this novel, he’s the dullest bad boy in the history of bad boys. He’s made to sit perpetually in the corner, facing the wall. I thought about this dead spot (life) in Robinson’s novels during the scenes in which Jack and Della talk about “Hamlet,” and in those in which Jack later reads and considers the play. Jack and Della are both big readers; they dabble in verse; their courtship includes conversations about poetry. Their “Hamlet” discussion takes place during an implausible overnight the two of them spend in a locked whites-only cemetery. They consider some of the plot points and ideas in the play. Jack later sees similarities in their predicament to that of Shakespeare’s Gertrude and Claudius. Can deep love triumph over, and in some sense negate, crimes and sins? This is all interesting enough. But the reason we still read “Hamlet,” and the reason its ideas remain worth talking about, is because the play is acid- bright on the page. The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, in her journals, remarked that Shakespeare speaks intimately to us across centuries because he was, in her indelible phrase, a “cheerful, nose-picking whoremaster.” That is, as Murdoch’s biographer, Peter J. Conradi, explains, paraphrasing her thoughts, Shakespeare “created not out of simple high-mindedness but, genius apart, out of an intimate and humble understanding of base emotions, of lust and rage, hatred, envy, jealousy and the will-to-power as well as astonishment at ordinariness.” You rarely sense base emotion of any variety in “Jack.” Jack and Della, unlike Stanley and Stella, are not allowed, for example, to revel in anything as simple as lust. They shyly titillate only each other’s souls. Della, in her deep need to shake off the expectations of family and society, is a fascinating character, and should resonate far more than she does. Neither she nor Jack seems to have independent life. You sense them placing their heads directly into the halters the author has made for them. My Boy Jack. Author Rudyard Kipling and his wife search for their 17-year-old son after he goes missing during WWI.