Back Os Deuses dos Cabeçalhos dos Cadernos de Cópias Portuguese

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

A page from a 19th-century copybook, in which the printed headings have been copied. The homily is paraphrased from the 17th-century sermon Against Detraction by Isaac Barrow: "Good nature, like a bee, collects honey from every herb. Ill nature, like a spider, sucks poison from the flowers."

"The Gods of the Copybook Headings" is a poem by Rudyard Kipling, characterized by biographer Sir David Gilmour as one of several "ferocious post-war eruptions" of Kipling's souring sentiment concerning the state of Anglo-European society.[1] It was first published in the Sunday Pictorial of London on 26 October 1919. In America, it was published as "The Gods of the Copybook Maxims" in Harper's Magazine in January 1920.[2]

In the poem, Kipling's narrator counterposes the "Gods" of the title, who embody eternal truths, against "the Gods of the Market-Place", who represent an optimistic self-deception into which it supposes society has fallen in the early 20th century.[3]

The "copybook headings" to which the title refers were proverbs or maxims, often drawn from sermons and scripture extolling virtue and wisdom, that were printed at the top of the pages of copybooks, special notebooks used by 19th-century British schoolchildren. The students had to copy the maxims repeatedly, by hand, down the page. The exercise was thought to serve simultaneously as a form of moral education and penmanship practice.

  1. ^ Gilmour, David (2002). The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. p. 275. Retrieved 17 December 2019. The Gods of the Copybook Headings.
  2. ^ "Harper's Magazine 1920". Retrieved 1 July 2020.
  3. ^ Rutherford, Andrew, ed. (1999). War Stories and Poems – Rudyard Kipling. ISBN 978-0192836861. Retrieved 11 December 2012.

Rich TVX News Network Site

Rich TVX News Network Info

© MMXXIII Rich X Search. We shall prevail. All rights reserved. Rich X Search