'Poetic prophecy': 105-year-old Rudyard Kipling poem perfectly captures what is happening to the West

When people discuss prophetic authors, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Ray Bradbury are almost always cited. But Rudyard Kipling — author of “The Jungle Book”? Now, that’s not a name you typically hear when it comes to clairvoyant writers.

However, Glenn Beck rediscovered Kipling’s 1919 poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings,” and it’s enough to earn the British-Indian author the label of prescient.

A warning against progressivism (or in Kipling’s day, Fabian socialism), the poem metaphorically describes the very horrors we’re seeing unfold in modern society.

“I remember reading it and thinking, wow, look what's coming, and now almost all of it has been done,” says Glenn, adding that the poem warns "of a time when all of those things that everybody knows is true are destroyed and lost.”

Reading the poem, Glenn sheds light on certain lines that especially capture what we’ve witnessed happen to our country in the name of progressivism:

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The opening lines read:

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,

I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.

Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

“Copybook headings used to be things that were up at the top of your writing book when you used to have to practice penmanship,” Glenn explains, adding that these headings were maxims that were universally accepted as true, such as “God is good, water will wet, fire will burn.”

In the lines above, Kipling makes the point that the “Gods of the Market Place” — which might be interpreted as cultural fads, the Overton Window, or the shifting ideologies of governing bodies — do not stand the test of time like the “Gods of the Copybook Headings,” granted they represent what is eternally true.

The poem goes on to describe the gods of the copybook headings as “lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind” and “utterly out of touch.” Meanwhile, the gods of the marketplace promise “perpetual peace,” “fuller life,” and “abundance for all.”

They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;

They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;

So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

“We’re building a world right now” where “all these ‘old fashioned’ ideas like men are men, women are women, and they can’t change sexes just by saying it” are considered, like the poem says — “out of touch,” Glenn points out.

In the fifth stanza, Kipling exposes the lies of the marketplace gods:

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.

They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.

But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

Glenn sees a multitude of parallels.

“Who has been saying — even now as we are on the verge of nuclear war — that the other side will bring war and they are bringing peace?” he asks, adding that that same group is also “trying to take your weapons away from you.”

And “are we not being bound right now and sold to the highest bidder in China?” he asks.

To hear the remainder of the poem, which Glenn reveres as “poetic prophecy,” and his stanza by stanza analysis, watch the clip above.

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