Talk:The Seven Seas/The Last Rhyme of True Thomas
". . . but one of [Kipling's] truest and strongest pieces we have never seen or heard quoted, "The Last Rhyme of True Thomas." There is a touch of declamation in it—all Mr. Kipling's heroes, unlike Carlyle's, are very conscious of their strong attitude—but the conception is, otherwise, a fine one. It is the old bard, Thomas the Rhymer, and "the King" (we need not look for his exact date in the history book) proposes to knight him. But the bard bids him wait; he sings a stave or two, and the King sees his enemies come over the bill, and grasps his weapons; he changes his note, and the King sees his lost love of old years. This is the Magic of the bard, "and—ye," says True Thomas, pausing rather too sensationally for a poet, between his words, "would—make—a Knight o' me." The King would not, as it appears, for the last stave has sent him away full of other thoughts. Mr. Kipling is right. Poetry and Art cannot be organized; for those who would organize them inevitably write them at fifty, where poet and artist will set them at a hundred with a certain subconscious feeling that it may be a hundred raised to the power of infinity. You cannot estimate Truth; it is too various, too quick, too magical; and that is what the poets and the artists know, and why they grow impatient, not merely with practical men (whom they, in turn, honestly under-estimate in sheer astonishment at their mental processes—"Will you allow me to examine your bumps?" as Charles Lamb said), but with the philosophers, too, who do not deserve all their anger. . . ." (The Living Age, 24 December 1910)
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