Toomai of the Elephants
The People of the Eastern Ice, they are melting like the snow--They beg for coffee and sugar; they go where the white men go.The People of the Western Ice, they learn to steal and fight;They sell their furs to the trading-post; they sell their souls to the white.The People of the Southern Ice, they trade with the whaler's crew;Their women have many ribbons, but their tents are torn and few.But the People of the Elder Ice, beyond the white man's ken--Their spears are made of the narwhal-horn, and they are the last of the Men!
About this text
Toomai of the Elephants 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, Toomai of the Elephants, in Songs from Books (1912), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #15529, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/kipling-songs-from-books/toomai-of-the-elephants.html, id L20414.
Form and metre
Toomai of the Elephants is 8 lines in a single stanza. It is in rhyming couplets. The metre is iambic heptameter, measured from the stress the words themselves fix (confidence 78%).
See other poems in rhyming couplets, other poems in iambic heptameter.
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 AABBCCDD snowA · goA · fightB · whiteB · crewC · fewC · kenD · menD
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 heptameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| The People of the Eastern Ice, they are melting like the snow-- | 15 | ·/˘··/˘···/˘··· |
| They beg for coffee and sugar; they go where the white men go. | 15 | ···/˘·/˘······· |
| The People of the Western Ice, they learn to steal and fight; | 14 | ·/˘··/˘······· |
| They sell their furs to the trading-post; they sell their souls to the white. | 16 | ······/˘········ |
| The People of the Southern Ice, they trade with the whaler's crew; | 15 | ·/˘··/˘·····/˘· |
| Their women have many ribbons, but their tents are torn and few. | 15 | ·/˘·/˘/˘······· |
| But the People of the Elder Ice, beyond the white man's ken-- | 15 | ··/˘··/˘······· |
| Their spears are made of the narwhal-horn, and they are the last of the Men! | 17 | ······/˘········· |
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.