22 pages • 44-minute read
Gunga Din
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
Despite being rigorously structured and carefully metered, “Gunga Din” sounds casual, informal—like a person talking.
The poem is divided into five 17-line stanzas that follow the chronological order typical of a narrative. Kipling creates a subtle patterning for rhymes that is consistent without being insistent. The rhyme scheme is AABCCBDDEFFEGGFGGHG, a back-and-forth rhyming pattern in which every sixth line echoes a word from a previous triplet—bookends that echo the poem’s framing device of a speaker looking back. The rhyme scheme mimics the vehicle of memory, with the speaker moving back and forth in time as he retells the story of the water-bearer.
To create the effect of the speaker talking to his buddies, the meter reflects conversational rhythms, avoiding a singsong approach. Kipling alternates lines of eight syllables (iambic tetrameter) with lines of six syllables (iambic trimeter). Each stanza closes with a quintain in which one or more lines actually has ten syllables. This metric variation, along with enjambment (lines that move into the next line without end-punctuation), gives the poem its immediacy and encourages recitation that seems unforced.
Dialect
Kipling never gives a physical description of his narrator. Instead, he uses diction and register as characterization. The speaker’s accented speech reveals his background and education.
British poetry in the late 19th century tended toward chiseled lines, elegant diction, rich imagery, learned allusions, and intricate figurative language: qualities typical of the towering literary figure of Kipling’s era—Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Kipling’s poem, however, features the unvarnished Cockney dialect, slang, and idioms typically found in the lower-class neighborhoods of London’s East End. The speaker’s grammar is fractured, and he uses elision, for example, omitting “h” sounds from the beginning of words (as in “out ’ere” [Line 2]), nasal “g” sounds (as in “bloomin’ boots” [Line 6]), and the closing “d” and “f” sounds of words like “and” and “of.”
Kipling rejects the assumption that dialect poetry should be sentimental and simple—an association based on classist bias typical of British 19th-century social hierarchy. Rather, dialect here produces a psychologically complex character—a man confronting the hollowness of what he has believed.
The Ballad
Five years after Kipling’s death, as England wrestled with defining the artistic merit of its first Nobel laureate, the poet T. S. Eliot (himself a future Nobelist) published a lengthy defense of Kipling. The 30+ page essay lauds Kipling’s early poems, among them “Gunga Din,” as expressions of a demanding genre of poetry that dated to the Middle Ages: the ballad.
Ballads focus on storytelling and character; they were designed to be heard, not studied; sung, not read; enjoyed, not discussed. Their language was typically accessible and immediate; the content bold and dramatic; the lines musical and rhythmic.
For Eliot, Kipling’s mastery of the subtle demands of the ballad marked his greatest achievement as a poet. Eliot notes Kipling’s attention to the rhythm: Kipling juxtaposes vowel and consonant sounds, most notably in his use of assonance and consonance, to achieve a subtle sonic effect.
Although YouTube has archived dozens of recitations of the poem, perhaps the version most closely aligned with Eliot’s praise is a musical adaption written and performed by singer-songwriter Jim Croce (1943-1973). The song, released on Croce’s debut album, 1966’s Facets, reveals how the poem uses the verse and refrain structure typical of a song.
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