As to Kipling: He intended many of his poems to be songs (in the contents of his collected poems, I find 28 titles that begin with "Song", and 10 with "Ballad"), and many of them were set to music (some of them many times) in his lifetime, long before Peter Bellamy & Leslie Fish. Some became music-hall favorites. I have never succeeded in finding any of those old tunes, except for the standard one to "Mandalay", which crossed the Atlantic and was the kind of thing my grandparents would have sung in the bath, despite its having a range that is actually worse than that of the "Star-Spangled Banner". (One of my uncles used to say "Why didn't he kiss her where she *sat*?".) I spent a couple of hours once in the New York Public Library browsing in Kipling Society publications from the 1920s, and there were extensive listings of sheet music -- all, I suppose, now irrecoverable.

--- Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net

||: Be careful what you do with your resentment. :||