| Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). Verse: 1885–1918. 1922. | | | | To the Unknown Goddess |
| | | WILL you conquer my heart with your beauty, my soul going out from afar? | |
| Shall I fall to your hand as a victim of crafty and cautious shikar? | |
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| Have I met you and passed you already, unknowing, unthinking, and blind? | |
| Shall I meet you next season at Simla, O sweetest and best of your kind? | |
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| Does the P. and O. bear you to meward, or, clad in short frocks in the West, | 5 |
| Are you growing the charms that shall capture and torture the heart in my breast? | |
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| Will you stay in the Plains till September—my passion as warm as the day? | |
| Will you bring me to book on the Mountains, or where the thermantidotes play? | |
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| When the light of your eyes shall make pallid the mean lesser lights I pursue, | |
| And the charm of your presence shall lure me from love of the gay “thirteen-two”; 1 | 10 |
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| When the “peg” 2 and the pigskin shall please not; when I buy me Calcutta-built clothes; | |
| When I quit the Delight of Wild Asses, forswearing the swearing of oaths; | |
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| As a deer to the hand of the hunter when I turn ’mid the gibes of my friends; | |
| When the days of my freedom are numbered, and the life of the bachelor ends. | |
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| Ah, Goddess! child, spinster, or widow—as of old on Mars Hill when they raised | 15 |
| To the God that they knew not an altar—so I, a young Pagan, have praised | |
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| The Goddess I know not nor worship; yet, if half that men tell me be true, | |
| You will come in the future, and therefore these verses are written to you. | |
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