The City of Sleep by Rudyard Kipling

The City of Sleep

BY RUDYARD KIPLING

Over the edge of the purple down,

   Where the single lamplight gleams,

Know ye the road to the Merciful Town

   That is hard by the Sea of Dreams –

Where the poor may lay their wrongs away,

   And the sick may forget to weep?

But we – pity us! Oh, pity us!

   We wakeful; ah, pity us! –

We must go back with Policeman Day –

   Back from the City of Sleep!

Weary they turn from the scroll and crown,

   Fetter and prayer and plough –

They that go up to the Merciful Town,

   For her gates are closing now.

It is their right in the Baths of Night

   Body and soul to steep,

But we – pity us! ah, pity us!

   We wakeful; oh, pity us! –

We must go back with Policeman Day –

   Back from the City of Sleep!

Over the edge of the purple down,

   Ere the tender dreams begin,

Look – we may look – at the Merciful Town,

   But we may not enter in!

Outcasts all, from her guarded wall

   Back to our watch we creep:

We – pity us! ah, pity us!

   We wakeful; ah, pity us! –

We that go back with Policeman Day –

   Back from the City of Sleep!

About the Poet:

Rudyard Kipling is one of the best-known of the late Victorian poets and story-tellers. Although he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907, his political views, which grew more toxic as he aged, have long made him critically unpopular. In the New Yorker, Charles McGrath remarked “Kipling has been variously labelled a colonialist, a jingoist, a racist, an anti-Semite, a misogynist, a right-wing imperialist warmonger; and—though some scholars have argued that his views were more complicated than he is given credit for—to some degree he really was all those things. That he was also a prodigiously gifted writer who created works of inarguable greatness hardly matters anymore, at least not in many classrooms, where Kipling remains politically toxic.” However, Kipling’s works for children, above all his novel The Jungle Book, first published in 1894, remain part of popular cultural through the many movie versions made and remade since the 1960s.