The White Man's Burden
By Rudyard Kipling
McClure's Magazine 12 (Feb. 1899).
- 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 made 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 will 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.
Preferred citation: Kipling, Rudyard. "The White Man's Burden." McClure's Magazine 12 (Feb. 1899). http://web.syr.edu/~fjzwick/kipling/kipling.html In Jim Zwick, ed., Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898-1935. http://web.syr.edu/~fjzwick/ail98-35.html (January 1996).