Notes on the text
(by Roger Ayers)
| the poem
“THEIR NAME LIVETH
“… we remember and must charge our children to remember, that, as our dead were equal in sacrifice, so are they equal in honour, …”[Lines 43 & 44] And there lay gentlemen from out of all the seas / That ever called him King. From August 1914 onwards, rest camps for troops from all over the Empire had been set up in the area, later followed by the establishment of Base Hospitals at Boulogne and nearby Wimereaux. Many of the dead had been casualties being treated in these hospitals.
All that they had they gave – they gave –The basic meaning of which is:
In sure and single faith.
There can no knowledge reach the grave
To make them grudge their death
Save only if they understood
That, after all was done,
We they redeemed denied their blood
And mocked the gains it won.
‘They gave their all in the firm belief that it was worthwhile. Nothing could make them grudge their death, except if they were to learn that the living had forgotten what their deaths had achieved and thus made a mockery of their sacrifice.’This sense of these lines matches the final sentence of the King’s Speech:
“… I fervently pray that, both as nations and individuals, we may so order our lives after the ideals for which our brethren died that we may be able to meet their gallant souls once more, humbly but unashamed.”but Kipling’s lines have proved capable of being questioned as to their meaning.
“even ‘home’ should be turned to journalistic account” and “Was not Kipling of interest to America?”. However, she knew that Kipling was well known for not giving interviews to reporters.It is possible to read the penultimate line of the poem in two ways; either as (with my insertions in italics) ‘We, whom they had redeemed, then denied their blood’ – that is, by doing something wrong in the future, or it can be read as ‘We, whom they redeemed had denied their blood’ – that is, the wrong has already been done. According to Sheridan, Kipling meant the latter and that it was the actions by the United States during and after the war that had already ‘…denied their blood’. It is, of course, possible that Sheridan, unaware of a close link between the verses and the speech given by the King, really did not see the first meaning and hence asked the question.
Dismissing any doubts with “As to Kipling friendship, what was it worth?”, she deliberately trapped Kipling, whom, she wrote, “stumbled into my net. He let himself go about America, and I, breathless with suppressed eagerness and excitement, stored up every word, threw in a question and a remark to stimulate him to further statements …”
Her version of what was said appeared in the New York Sunday World of 10 September 1922 as a record of an interview in which she wrote that Kipling’s remarks were in response to her asking him what he meant by the last lines of the poem, ‘The King’s Pilgrimage’; that is, what was it ‘that mocked the gains they won’?