In The Neolithic Age - Analysis

A bragging voice that wants to be right

Kipling’s speaker begins as a swaggering artist-warrior who believes taste is a matter of life and death. In the opening stanza he’s not simply a poet; he’s a man who savage warfare did I wage for food and fame, and his singing is braided into that violence. The poem’s central claim, though, is a rebuke to this certainty: the urge to declare one style right and another wrong is ancient, addictive, and morally embarrassing—and it never really goes away.

The tone is deliberately mock-epic: grand talk of the red Dawn of Man sits next to jaunty slang like outré. That mismatch matters because it makes the speaker’s self-importance look silly even before the poem openly corrects him.

Art criticism as murder

The poem’s first section turns aesthetic rivalry into literal bloodshed. A rival from Solutré calls his style outré, and the speaker answers with a tomahawk. He then leaves his views on Art below the heart of another artist, the mammothistic etcher. Kipling makes the joke brutal on purpose: the speaker treats disagreement as a bodily insult that must be “answered,” as if art were tribal territory.

That brutality sharpens in the next stanza when he stripped them, scalp from skull, threads their teeth neatly on a thong, and calmly declares, I know my work is right. The grotesque trophies are a caricature of artistic certainty: the speaker doesn’t merely want to win; he wants proof, souvenirs, and a clean moral ledger.

The Totem’s interruption: shame, not debate

The hinge of the poem arrives when the speaker’s Totem appears and names what the speaker refuses to name: shame. This is not presented as an intellectual correction but as a spiritual recoil, as if the tribe’s own sacred symbol cannot tolerate the murder done in the name of “taste.” Then comes the poem’s famous line: There are nine and sixty ways of making tribal lays, and every single one is right.

What changes here is the target. The poem isn’t saying all poems are equally good; it’s saying the speaker’s premise—that one true way authorizes contempt—produces violence. The Totem’s pronouncement doesn’t flatter the rival; it disarms the killer.

Reincarnation into modernity: the same squabble in new clothes

After a row of asterisks like a long blink, the speaker returns in new clothing—whiter, weaker flesh—and is now a minor poet with a modern stamp of approval: certified by Traill. The joke is sharp: civilization doesn’t end the urge to posture; it gives it credentials. Even the setting widens from caves to empires—seven seas from marge to marge—but the human behavior stays comically small.

Kipling keeps insisting on continuity: Still they skirmish, Still we pinch and slap, Still we let our business slide. The repeated Still is the poem’s drumming realization that modern argument—especially artistic argument—can be another version of the old scuffle, a respectable way to scratch and jab.

The poem’s big tension: tolerance versus taste

The refrain, repeated at the end with emphatic dashes—And—every—single—one—of—them—is—right!—creates the poem’s main contradiction. On one hand, it’s liberating: a world where various kinds of man exist will naturally produce various kinds of song. On the other hand, the speaker’s earlier certainty hasn’t vanished; it’s been chastened. The poem wants to stop the speaker from killing over style, not to pretend style doesn’t matter. That’s why the word right is provocative: Kipling uses it to short-circuit the murderous need for a single standard, even if it risks sounding like a blanket endorsement.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If every single one is right, what exactly is the Totem condemning—bad art, or the need to make art a weapon? The poem’s evidence points to the second. The shame arrives not when the speaker writes a poor line, but when he turns views on Art into a blade and then congratulates himself for being right.

From Paris to Khatmandhu: scale as moral perspective

The poem closes by stretching the map: Kew to Khatmandhu, Clapham to Martaban, and, in a final wink, the moose roaming where Paris roars. This widening isn’t travelogue; it’s moral perspective. When the world is this large, the speaker’s old certainty looks provincial—another tribal habit dressed up as judgment. The repeated refrain becomes not a slogan about craft, but an antidote to the oldest artistic sin in the poem: confusing disagreement with an enemy that must be killed.