"The Gods of the Copybook Headings" is a poem by Rudyard Kipling, characterized by biographer Sir David Gilmour as one of several "ferocious post-war eruptions" of Kipling's growing reactionary sentiment about the state of Anglo-European society. It was first published in the Sunday Pictorial of London on October 26, 1919; in America, it was published as "The Gods of the Copybook Margins" in Harper's Magazine in January, 1920.In the poem, Kipling's narrator counterposes the "Gods" of the title, who embody "age-old, unfashionable wisdom," against "the Gods of the Market-Place" who represent the "habits of wishful thinking" into which society had fallen in the early 20th century.The "copybook headings" to which the title refers were proverbs or maxims, often drawn from sermons and scripture extolling virtue and wisdom, that were printed at the top of the pages of copybooks, special notebooks used by 19th-century British school-children. The students had to copy the maxims repeatedly, by hand, down the page. The exercise was thought to serve simultaneously as a form of moral education and penmanship practice.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings, Stanza 1 (1919).
Other works
Context: As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
