"Дэнни Дивер": Баллада о солдате в Индии

Poem by Rudyard Kipling

"Danny Deever" is an 1890 poem by Rudyard Kipling, one of the first of the Barrack Room Ballads. It received wide critical and popular acclaim, and is often regarded as one of the most significant pieces of Kipling's early verse. The poem, a ballad, describes the execution of a British soldier in India for murder. His execution is viewed by his regiment, paraded to watch it, and the poem is composed of the comments they exchange as they see him hanged.

Kipling had worked as a journalist in northern British India during the 1880s, initially for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and later for The Pioneer in Allahabad. In 1886, the Gazette was taken over by a new editor, who began publishing Kipling's short stories and poetry to "put some sparkle" into the paper. Later that year, a first volume of the poems was published as Departmental Ditties, and a volume of short stories, Plain Tales from the Hills, followed in 1887. He continued to write at a rapid rate, publishing in a number of different papers, and in 1888 the Indian Railway Library series published five new volumes of short stories plus a novel. A growing theme in these stories was Army life, particularly among working class private soldiers rather than the middle class young officers who had appeared in the pre 1887 stories. Starting with The Three Musketeers (March 1887, then Plain Tales), he began a series with a recurring trio of privates, Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris, who described the adventures of barracks life in exaggerated Yorkshire, Irish, and Cockney accents. His focus on the soldier as an individual, rather than a romanticised caricature, was unusual for the period; Charles Carrington, his official biographer, argued that "you will find no treatment of the English soldier on any adequate scale between Shakespeare and Kipling". There is some dispute about how well Kipling knew actual soldiers; Carrington suggested he mainly socialised with officers and drew his characters from ex servicemen he had known in his schooldays, while David Gilmour recorded that he visited barracks and canteens at Mian Mir as the guest of the NCOs, taking a particular interest in slang and soldier's songs. In early 1889, Kipling left the Pioneer, and decided to return to England to further his literary career. After a voyage through the Far East and across North America, he arrived in England that October. Here, his first new poetry was published (under a pseudonym, "Yussuf") in Macmillan's Magazine in November and December 1889 one of these, The Ballad of East and West, would become one of his best known works followed by a series of pieces submitted to William Henley's Scots Observer. The second of these, Danny Deever, was published on 22 February 1890 and rapidly followed by a series of others which would become known as the Barrack Room Ballads. In 1889, prior to leaving India, Kipling had offered a series of twelve "soldier poems" to a publisher under the name Barrack Room Ballads, but it is not known which poems were contained in this. Edmonia Hill, a friend who travelled with him on the voyage to America, wrote in her diary that after leaving Burma he announced "I'll write some Tommy Atkins ballads". The majority of the series are assumed to have been written in early 1890. The poem describes the execution of a soldier for murder, and it has been suggested that it was inspired in part by the execution of Private Flaxman of the Leicestershire Regiment, at Lucknow in 1887. A number of details of this execution correspond to the occasion described by Kipling in the poem, and he later used a story similar to that of Flaxman's as a basis for the story Black Jack. A number of Kipling's short stories and poems of the period can be identified as having their origins in a wide range of sources, ranging from contemporary reports of fighting in Burma to passages from Daniel Deronda.

Danny Deever is often seen as one of Kipling's most powerful early works, and was greeted with acclaim when first published. David Masson, a professor of literature at the University of Edinburgh, is often reported (perhaps apocryphally) to have waved the magazine in which it appeared at his students, crying "Here's literature! Here's literature at last!". W. E. Henley, the editor of the Scots Observer, is even said to have danced on his wooden leg when he first received the text. The poem was later commented on by the poet William Butler Yeats, who noted that "[Kipling] interests a critical audience today by the grotesque tragedy of Danny Deever". Another poet, T. S. Eliot, called the poem "technically (as well as in content) remarkable", holding it up as one of the best of Kipling's ballads. Eliot described the poem's combination of "heavy beat and variation of page" as remarkable both technically and in content. He concluded that Danny Deever was "a barrack room ballad which somehow attains the intensity of poetry". Both Yeats and Eliot were writing shortly after Kipling's death, in 1936 and 1941, when critical opinion of his poetry was at a low point; both, nonetheless, drew out Danny Deever for attention as a significant work. Discussing that low critical opinion in a 1942 essay, George Orwell described Danny Deever as an example of Kipling "at his worst, and also his most vital almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life". He felt the work was an example of what he described as "good bad poetry"; verse which is essentially vulgar, yet undeniably seductive and "a sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary man."

The Barrack Room Ballads, as the name suggests, are songs of soldiers. Written by Kipling, they share a form and a style with traditional Army songs. Kipling was one of the first to pay attention to these works; Charles Carrington noted that in contrast to the songs of sailors, "no one had thought of collecting genuine soldiers' songs, and when Kipling wrote in this traditional style it was not recognised as traditional". Kipling himself was fond of singing his poetry, of writing it to fit the rhythm of a particular tune. In this specific case, the musical source has been suggested as the Army's "grotesque bawdy song" Barnacle Bill the Sailor, but it is possible that some other popular tune of the period was used. However, the ballads were not published with any music, and though they were quickly adapted to be sung, new musical settings were written; a musical setting by Walter Damrosch was described as "Teddy Roosevelt's favourite song", and is sometimes encountered on its own as a tune entitled They're Hanging Danny Deever in the Morning. To date, at least a dozen published recordings are known, made from 1893 to 1985. The tune "They're Hanging Danny Deever in the Morning" (Walter Damrosch) was played from the Campanile at UC Berkeley at the end of the last day of classes for the Spring Semester of 1930, and has been repeated every year since, with a certain ironic humour, at the beginning of final exams week, making it one of the oldest campus traditions. Percy Grainger composed a setting of Danny Deever for male chorus and orchestra.