As Julian Moore writes in KJ 290 it is a tale about the death of a once great society. The title and imagery of the poem are taken from a story in The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night. Kipling had already made similar prophetic warnings of impending disaster in two poems of 1902, “The Dykes” and “The Islanders”. All is done in the name of “the State”, but that, Kipling warns, in a bitter reference to the war to come, will not save them, for “an host had prepared their destruction, but still they denied it”. Literally drunk, and also metaphorically drunk on the promised power that democracy will bring, the reeling crowd joyfully assist their leaders to destroy the “walls that their fathers had made them”, encourage the perversion of justice, call on “the ruled to rebel”, and fling away the “imperial gains of the age”. Now, “the multitude” is denounced along with the Liberal and Labour “panders” who arouse, and surrender to, its “lust”. “The City of Brass”, Morning Post 28 June 1909, was written during the long acrimonious debate on Lloyd George’s proposals to increase income tax, and to introduce a new land tax in his “people’s budget”, though as the poem makes plain, it was the apparently unstoppable process of reform and the increasingly vocal demands of an organised working-class movement, rather than the budget itself, that provoked Kipling’s fury. …the broad-minded inclusiveness of “The Sons of Martha” did not extend to Liberal politicians, or – as the true nature of Liberal social reforms became clearer – to many of the working class men who had voted them into power. Kipling himself, writing ten years later to his American publisher Frank Doubleday about the new collection The Years Between, describes the poem as: “a careful outline of the state to which socialism reduces a nation’. The poem is a fiercely patriotic defence of Britain’s age-old values and traditions and a denunciation of their potential destruction by the tax-raising, social-reforming Liberal government. First published in the Morning Post June 28th, 1909, and then reprinted in the same nrwspaper on June 11th, 1931 with a special article.
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