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Recent ventures with the illustrator Michael Woods resulted in Reynard the Fox, a new translation of the medieval fable, and Agon, a selection of Greek myths. It may be that Kipling had this hymn specifically in mind. After all, “The Glory of the Garden,” along with all the other poems in A School History was also written with the aim of instilling into young children a very different set of values and overthrowing the views expressed in hymns like “All Things Bright and Beauty.” He must have felt that this ambition had to some extent been achieved, because on 11 October 1919 he proudly told André Chevrillon that “The Glory of the Garden” had become ‘a sort of school recitation piece’. Letters 4, p. 580. Line 26] netting strawberries: Strawberries grow along the ground and are covered with nets to stop birds from eating them. There is a very interesting section on Kipling and Fletcher’s collaboration in Peter Sutcliffe’s The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (1978, Oxford), pp. 158-62. I quote from pp. 161-62: Lines 21-4] There’s not a pair of legs so thin … glorifieth every one: lines which capture to perfection the range of attitudes Kipling is balancing throughout the poem. Although everyone has a democratic part to play in maintaining a healthy garden, according entirely, that is, to individual abilities, the process still clearly reveals the hierarchical manner of the whole enterprise already noted in the gardener distributing jobs (line 10). But, with that said, it remains true, that if all members of society really do play a part, with the kind of dedication expected by traditional worship, then the Garden certainly will glorify every one, though the glory will now have been inspired by a patriotic and national passion rather than religious faith.
Title] The Glory of the Garden: Normally such a phrase would refer to the beauty of the flowers, bushes, and trees growing in a garden, and/or to the horticultural skill that has nurtured and arranged the various plants into a splendid pattern. It also invokes many images which link God’s presence with gardens, the ‘glory’ of the one often being equated naturally with the glory of the other. Kipling refers to these various connotations in his poem, but insists that the true glory of the garden lies elsewhere.Line 10] Told off to do: to have tasks allotted to them. Large country houses employed a number of specialist gardeners and many assistants who would be informed of their daily jobs in just this quasi-military way. Of course, Fletcher’s views weren’t Kipling’s: my point is merely that the School History wasn’t the place for Kipling to take a strong stand against conventional religious practice. Kipling and Fletcher
Hemans offers a highly sentimental, idealised view of English home life, from the stately to the humble, and although not carrying the overtly political message that is so important to Kipling, she does – rather oddly given her very different mood – seem to at least look in that direction by prefacing her poem with an epigram taken from Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion (1808):Lines 30-33] That half …upon his knees … wash your hands and pray…away!: As has been made clear throughout the poem, Kipling’s call for people to sink to their knees and pray has little to do with conventional religious practice: he is simply asking that the same kind of devotion demanded by religious institutions be given to secular activities. The most detailed of Shakespeare’s comparisons between a garden and England comes in Richard II. Queen Isabel, unaware that her husband has been imprisoned, walks in the garden and stops to listen to the gardener and his assistants discussing Richard’s fate. In the process they advance a number of extended comparisons between the condition of England (over which they have no control) and the condition of the garden for which they are fully responsible. One of the assistants asks whether the rebels Wiltshire, Bushy and Greene are dead. The gardener replies:
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