| Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). Verse: 1885–1918. 1922. | | | | The Puzzler |
| | | THE CELT in all his variants from Builth to Bally-hoo, | |
| His mental processes are plain—one knows what he will do, | |
| And can logically predicate his finish by his start; | |
| But the English—ah, the English!—they are quite a race apart. | |
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| Their psychology is bovine, their outlook crude and raw. | 5 |
| They abandon vital matters to be tickled with a straw, | |
| But the straw that they were tickled with—the chaff that they were fed with— | |
| They convert into a weaver’s beam to break their foeman’s head with. | |
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| For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State, | |
| They arrive at their conclusions—largely inarticulate. | 10 |
| Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none; | |
| But sometimes in a smoking-room, one learns why things were done. | |
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| Yes, sometimes in a smoking-room, through clouds of “Ere” and “Ums,” | |
| Obliquely and by inference, illumination comes, | |
| On some step that they have taken, or some action they approve— | 15 |
| Embellished with the argot of the Upper Fourth Remove. | |
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| In telegraphic sentences, half nodded to their friends, | |
| They hint a matter’s inwardness—and there the matter ends. | |
| And while the Celt is talking from Valencia to Kirkwall, | |
| The English—ah, the English!—don’t say anything at all. | 20 | | | |
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