"The White Man's Burden" Rudyard Kipling Tonya Howe Transcription, correction, editorial commentary, and markup Students and Staff at Marymount University Tonya Howe VIVA Literature in Context
Marymount University 2807 N. Glebe Road Arlington VA 22207 lic.anthology@gmail.coom
Published by Literature in Context under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 Unported License "The White Man's Burden" Rudyard Kipling Mclure's Magazine New York S/ S. McClure Co. February 1899 Online HathiTrust nd The page images and text for this digital edition have been sourced from the University of Michigan digitized volume of McClure's in HathiTrust. 59 volumes : illustrations ; 25 cm Volume 12, Issue 4, pp 290-291 English print single poem United States Philippines

This text is prepared as part of the Literature in Context project, which provides an accessible, reliable, curated, and marked-up selection of primary sources relevant to the study and the teaching of British and American literature. This project is was initially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and developed by faculty at The University of Virginia and Marymount University.

Research informing these annotations draws on publicly-accessible resources, with links provided where possible. Annotations have also included common knowledge, defined as information that can be found in multiple reliable sources. If you notice an error in these annotations, please contact lic.open.anthology@gmail.com.

Original spelling and capitalization is retained, though the long s has been silently modernized and ligatured forms are not encoded.

Hyphenation has not been retained, except where necessary for the sense of the word.

Page breaks have been retained. Catchwords, signatures, and running headers have not.

Materials have been transcribed from and checked against first editions, where possible. See the Sources section for more information.

 Numbered divs used. Library of Congress Name Authority File Library of Congress Classification Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Open Researcher and Contributor ID First Pass XML and Page Images McCLURE'S MAGAZINE. VOL. XII. FEBRUARY, 1899. NO. 4.
THE WHITE MAN'S BURDEN. By Rudyard Kipling. Take up the White Man's burden-- Send forth the best ye breed-- Go, bind your sons to exile To serve your captives' need; To wait, in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild-- Your new-caught sullen peoples, Half devil and half child. Take up the White Man's burden-- In patience to abide, To veil the threat of terror And check the show of pride; By open speech and simple, An hundred times mad plain, To seek another's profit And work another's gain. Take up the White Man's burden-- The savage wars of peace-- Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest (The end for others sought) Watch sloth and heathen folly Bring all your hope to nought. Take up the White Man's burden-- No iron rule of kings, But toil of serf and sweeper-- The tale of common things. The ports ye shall not enter, The roads ye shall not tread, Go make them with your living And mark them with your dead. Take up the White Man's burden-- And reap his old reward-- The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard-- The cry of hosts ye humour (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:-- "Why brought ye us from bondage, Our loved Egyptian night?" Take up the White Man's burden-- Ye dare not stoop to less-- Nor call too loud on freedom To cloak your weariness. By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent sullen peoples Shall weigh your God and you. Take up the White Man's burden! Have done with childish days-- The lightly proffered laurel, The easy ungrudged praise: Comes now, to search your manhood Through all the thankless years, Cold edged with dear-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers.