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Title: The Puzzler
Author: Rudyard Kipling [
More Titles by Kipling]
The Celt in all his variants from Builth to Ballyhoo,
His mental processes are plain--one knows what he will do,
And can logically predicate his finish by his start:
But the English--ah, the English!--they are quite a race apart.
Their psychology is bovine, their outlook crude and rare;
They abandon vital matters to be tickled with a straw;
But the straw that they were tickled with--the chaff that
they were fed with--
They convert into a weaver's beam to break their foeman's head
with.
For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State,
They arrive at their conclusions--largely inarticulate.
Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none;
But sometimes, in a smoking-room, one learns why things were
done.
In telegraphic sentences, half swallowed at the ends,
They hint a matter's inwardness--and there the matter ends.
And while the Celt is talking from Valencia to Kirkwall,
The English--ah, the English!--don't say anything at all!
-THE END-
Rudyard Kipling's poem: The Puzzler
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