God of our fathers, known of old, Lord of our far-flung battle-line, Beneath whose awful Hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine - Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget - lest we forget!
The tumult and the shouting dies; The Captains and the Kings depart: Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget - lest we forget!
Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget - lest we forget!
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, Such boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law - Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget - lest we forget!
For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard, All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding, calls not Thee to guard, For frantic boast and foolish word - Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!
- Rudyard Kipling, Recessional (1897)
Although the phrase ‘lest we forget’ is now closely associated with Remembrance Sunday and war remembrance more generally, it actually originated in a poem written almost twenty years before the outbreak of the First World War: Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Recessional’. The poem was composed for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, in 1897.
Although Kipling is often viewed as a flag-waver for imperialism, his views were more complex than such a view suggests, and this political poem goes against the celebratory mood of the Jubilee, reminding readers that the British Empire is trivial and transient in the face of the permanence of God:
For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard, All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding, calls not Thee to guard, For frantic boast and foolish word— Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!
In the first stanza, Kipling addresses God directly, calling him ‘God of our fathers, known of old’ and ‘Lord of our far-flung battle-line’: at the time Kipling was writing, the British Empire covered around a quarter of the globe, so it certainly was ‘far-flung’ in terms of its imperial possessions which it had to claim, and keep, by force, and in its dominion stretching over ‘palm and pine’.
God has an ‘awful Hand’: ‘awful’ is being used here in its older, original sense, namely ‘awe-inspiring’. Kipling asks God to ‘be with us yet’: not to desert his human creation. People are in danger of forgetting who really has ‘Dominion’ (a decidedly Biblical word) over the world: God, not man.
The tumult and the shouting dies; The Captains and the Kings depart: Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget!
In this second stanza, Kipling says that when empires fade, and the army captains and the kings have died, one thing remains: the sacrifice Christ made on the Cross.
Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget!
In the third stanza, Kipling turns his attention from the army to the navy: the ‘fire’ (gunfire) the navies make against other nations misses the mark, and the once-great naval force that is Britain is diminished (it was said that King Alfred the Great, when he wasn’t burning cakes, invented the English navy; this was the inspiration for the famous patriotic song ‘Rule Britannia’, where that embodiment of Britain, Britannia, is called upon to ‘rule the waves’). Britain’s ‘pomp’ and greatness are no more: like Nineveh and Tyre, ancient civilisations of the past, it will die away to nothing. Nineveh, which stood in what is now Iraq, was once the largest city in the world, and served as the capital of the Assyrian empire; Tyre, in modern-day Lebanon, was one of the metropolises of the Phoenicians, traders and empire-builders of the ancient world.
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, Such boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law— Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget!
In the next stanza, Kipling argues that it is important to have God ‘in awe’: to be in awe of God’s power and superior might. It is important that the British, in their desire for more power around the world, don’t start forgetting this, as ‘Gentiles’ or ‘less breeds’ who do not follow God’s Law would do. (‘Gentile’ usually refers to someone who isn’t Jewish, but the word has been used, by extension, to refer to anyone who is not of Israeli heritage; and since Christianity had its roots in the Jewish Torah and the story of Moses, Kipling appears to be using ‘Gentile’ to mean ‘someone who does not follow the Judeo-Christian faith’.)
For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard, All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding, calls not Thee to guard, For frantic boast and foolish word— Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!
The final stanza of ‘Recessional’ continues the argument of the previous stanza: the ‘heathen heart’ of one who does not follow God (‘heathen’ is another word that has been used to mean simply ‘one who is not Christian’) and simply follows the law of battle (the ‘reeking tube’ of the gun and the ‘iron shard’ of shrapnel?) is doomed to fail with its ‘frantic boast’ and ‘foolish word’, and is simply dust founded on dust, death founded on more death, an empire founded on ashes – weak foundations indeed. Kipling concludes ‘Recessional’ with a call for God to have mercy on his people – Christians, and specifically, in this context, good British Christians.
