Kipling's narrative voice contrasts the purported eternal wisdom of these commonplace texts with the fashionable and (in Kipling's view) naïve modern ideas of "the Market-Place", making oblique reference, by way of puns or poetic references to older
geological time periods, to Welsh-born
Lloyd George and Liberal efforts at disarmament ("the
Cambrian measures"),
feminism ("the ...
Feminian Sandstones"), and socialist policies advocated by trade-unionists, many of whom were coalminers ("the
Carboniferous Epoch"). In a footnote to a philosophical essay, Francis Slade compared Kipling's theme to
Horace's Epistles I.10 ("The Advantages of Country Life"), in which the Roman poet says:Drive Nature off with a pitchfork, she’ll still press back, And secretly burst in triumph through your sad disdain.According to Slade, while the poem's verbosity is "far removed from Horace's elegant succinctness", it does "make the same point with some force".
John C. Bogle described the poem as "beautifully captur[ing] the thinking of
Schumpeter and
Keynes", who espoused, respectively, "entrepreneurship" and "
animal spirits": both ideas of the market place.
T. S. Eliot included the poem in his 1941 collection ''
A Choice of Kipling's Verse''. ==References==