Chapter Headings: The Jungle Books
Now Chil the Kite brings home the nightThat Mang the Bat sets free--The herds are shut in byre and hutFor loosed till dawn are we.This is the hour of pride and power,Talon and tush and claw.Oh hear the call!--Good hunting allThat keep the Jungle Law!
Words in this poem
- byre n.
- A cow house. [N. of Eng.& Scot.] [Cf, Icel. bür pantry, Sw. bur cage,Dan. buur, E.bower.]
- tush interj.
- An exclamation indicating check, rebuke, or contempt; as, tush, tush! do not speak of it.
- jungle n.
- A dense growth of brushwood, grasses, reeds, vines, etc.; an almost impenetrable thicket of trees, canes, and reedy vegetation, as in India, Africa, Australia, and Brazil. [Hind. jangal desert, forest, jungle; Skr. ja desert.]
Definitions and etymologies from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913.
About this text
Chapter Headings: The Jungle Books is in the public domain. This text is taken from Songs from Books, Project Gutenberg ebook #15529; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Rudyard Kipling, Chapter Headings: The Jungle Books, in Songs from Books (1912), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #15529, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/kipling-songs-from-books/chapter-headings-the-jungle-books.html, id L20406.
Form and metre
Chapter Headings: The Jungle Books is 8 lines in a single stanza. The metre is iambic tetrameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 95%).
See other poems in iambic tetrameter.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Rhyme words, stanza by stanza
The word that ends each line, lettered by the rhyme it makes; a dash is a line whose rhyme the dictionary could not confirm.
- 1 -A-A-B-B night · freeA · hut · weA · power · clawB · all · lawB
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against iambic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Now Chil the Kite brings home the night | 8 | ········ |
| That Mang the Bat sets free-- | 6 | ······ |
| The herds are shut in byre and hut | 8 | ·····/·· |
| For loosed till dawn are we. | 6 | ······ |
| This is the hour of pride and power, | 9 | ···/···/˘ |
| Talon and tush and claw. | 6 | /˘···· |
| Oh hear the call!--Good hunting all | 8 | ·····/˘· |
| That keep the Jungle Law! | 6 | ···/˘· |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.