Danny Deever

"Danny Deever" is an 1890 poem by Rudyard Kipling, one of the first of the Barrack-Room Ballads. It received wide critical and popular acclaim, and is often regarded as one of the most significant pieces of Kipling's early verse. The poem, a ballad, describes the execution of a British soldier in India for murder. His execution is viewed by his regiment, paraded to watch it, and the poem is composed of the comments they exchange as they see him hanged.

Kipling had worked as a journalist in northern British India during the 1880s, initially for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and later for The Pioneer in Allahabad. In 1886, the Gazette was taken over by a new editor, who began publishing Kipling's short stories and poetry to "put some sparkle" into the paper. Later that year, a first volume of the poems was published as Departmental Ditties, and a volume of short stories, Plain Tales from the Hills, followed in 1887. He continued to write at a rapid rate, publishing in a number of different papers and, in 1888, the Indian Railway Library series published five new volumes of short stories plus a novel.

A growing theme in these stories was Army life, particularly among working-class private soldiers rather than the middle-class young officers who had appeared in the pre-1887 stories. Starting with The Three Musketeers (March 1887, then Plain Tales), he began a series with a recurring trio of privates, Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris, who described the adventures of barracks life in exaggerated Yorkshire, Irish, and Cockney accents. His focus on the soldier as an individual, rather than a romanticised caricature, was unusual for the period; Charles Carrington, his official biographer, argued that "you will find no treatment of the English soldier on any adequate scale between Shakespeare and Kipling". There is some dispute about how well Kipling knew actual soldiers; Carrington suggested he mainly socialised with officers and drew his characters from ex-servicemen he had known in his schooldays, while David Gilmour recorded that he visited barracks and canteens at Mian Mir as the guest of the NCOs, taking a particular interest in slang and soldier's songs.

In early 1889, Kipling left the Pioneer, and decided to return to England to further his literary career. After a voyage through the Far East and across North America, he arrived in England that October. Here, his first new poetry was published (under a pseudonym, "Yussuf") in Macmillan's Magazine in November and December 1889 - one of these, The Ballad of East and West, would become one of his best known works - followed by a series of pieces submitted to William Henley's Scots Observer. The second of these, Danny Deever, was published on 22 February 1890 and rapidly followed by a series of others which would become known as the Barrack-Room Ballads.

In 1889, prior to leaving India, Kipling had offered a series of twelve "soldier poems" to a publisher under the name Barrack-Room Ballads, but it is not known which poems were contained in this. Edmonia Hill, a friend who travelled with him on the voyage to America, wrote in her diary that after leaving Burma he announced "I'll write some Tommy Atkins ballads". The majority of the series are assumed to have been written in early 1890.

The poem describes the execution of a soldier for murder, and it has been suggested that it was inspired in part by the execution of Private Flaxman of the Leicestershire Regiment, at Lucknow in 1887. A number of details of this execution correspond to the occasion described by Kipling in the poem, and he later used a story similar to that of Flaxman's as a basis for the story Black Jack. A number of Kipling's short stories and poems of the period can be identified as having their origins in a wide range of sources, ranging from contemporary reports of fighting in Burma to passages from Daniel Deronda.

The form is a dialogue, between a young and inexperienced soldier (or soldiers; he is given as "Files-on-Parade", suggesting a group) and a more experienced and older NCO ("the Colour-Sergeant"). The setting is an execution, generally presumed to be somewhere in India; a soldier, one Danny Deever, has been tried and sentenced to death for murdering a fellow soldier in his sleep, and his battalion is paraded to witness the hanging. This procedure strengthened discipline in the unit, by a process of deterrence, and helped inure inexperienced soldiers to the sight of death.

The young soldier is unaware of what is happening, at first – he asks why the bugles are blowing, and why the Sergeant looks so pale, but is told that Deever is being hanged, and that the regiment is drawn up in "[h]ollow square" to see it. He presses the Sergeant further, in the second verse – why are people breathing so hard? why does a man in the front-rank collapse? These signs of the effect that watching the hanging has upon the men of the regiment are explained away by the Sergeant as being due to the cold weather or the bright sun. The voice is reassuring, keeping the young soldier calm in the sight of death, just as the Sergeant will calm him with his voice in combat. In the third verse, Files thinks of Deever, saying that he slept alongside him, and drank with him, but the Sergeant reminds him that Deever is now alone, that he sleeps "out an' far to-night", and reminds the soldier of the magnitude of Deever's crime –