Sussex by Rudyard Kipling

 

There are a number of words in various foreign languages, particularly German, which I wish had direct English equivalents, but which unfortunately do not.   One of these words is the German “Heimat.”  Heimat is defined as “the relationship of a human being towards a certain spatial social unit. The term forms a contrast to social alienation and usually carries positive connotations.”¹  In other words, the special sense of a person belonging to a specific place, time, culture, and community.  The words “home” or “homeland” are sometimes used as English translations of this idea, but they both miss the mark.  Heimat is much narrower than homeland and much deeper than home.

I think Rudyard Kipling’s poem Sussex captures the idea of Heimat in a meaningful way.  It was written in 1902 about an area along the coast in south central England, where Kipling sent many of his childhood years and later lived with his family; you can feel the special attachment Kipling has to it.  It is important to note that Heimat rejects the idea of equality while at the same time not requiring any objective superiority for the human attachment.  God places each man as He chooses, and each man should think his Heimat is best on the basis that it is his.  I think the pine forests of Dixie put the frozen Arctic and burning Sahara to shame, but an Eskimo or Toureg would disagree.  Or as Kipling would put it, “God gives all men all earth to love, / But, since man’s heart is small, / Ordains for each one spot shall prove / Beloved over all. . . . Each to his choice, and I rejoice / The lot has fallen to me / In a fair ground-in a fair ground — / Yea, Sussex by the sea!”

 

Sussex

God gave all men all earth to love,
But, since our hearts are small
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Beloved over all;
That, as He watched Creation’s birth,
So we, in godlike mood,
May of our love create our earth
And see that it is good.

So one shall Baltic pines content,
As one some Surrey glade,
Or one the palm-grove’s droned lament
Before Levuka’s Trade.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground-in a fair ground —
Yea, Sussex by the sea!

No tender-hearted garden crowns,
No bosonied woods adorn
Our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs,
But gnarled and writhen thorn —
Bare slopes where chasing shadows skim,
And, through the gaps revealed,
Belt upon belt, the wooded, dim,
Blue goodness of the Weald.

Clean of officious fence or hedge,
Half-wild and wholly tame,
The wise turf cloaks the white cliff-edge
As when the Romans came.
What sign of those that fought and died
At shift of sword and sword?
The barrow and the camp abide,
The sunlight and the sward.

Here leaps ashore the full Sou’west
All heavy-winged with brine,
Here lies above the folded crest
The Channel’s leaden line,
And here the sea-fogs lap and cling,
And here, each warning each,
The sheep-bells and the ship-bells ring
Along the hidden beach.

We have no waters to delight
Our broad and brookless vales —
Only the dewpond on the height
Unfed, that never fails —
Whereby no tattered herbage tells
Which way the season flies —
Only our close-bit thyme that smells
Like dawn in Paradise.

Here through the strong and shadeless days
The tinkling silence thrills;
Or little, lost, Down churches praise
The Lord who made the hills:
But here the Old Gods guard their round,
And, in her secret heart,
The heathen kingdom Wilfrid found
Dreams, as she dwells, apart.

Though all the rest were all my share,
With equal soul I’d see
Her nine-and-thirty sisters fair,
Yet none more fair than she.
Choose ye your need from Thames to Tweed,
And I will choose instead
Such lands as lie ‘twixt Rake and Rye,
Black Down and Beachy Head.

I will go out against the sun
Where the rolled scarp retires,
And the Long Man of Wilmington
Looks naked toward the shires;
And east till doubling Rother crawls
To find the fickle tide,
By dry and sea-forgotten walls,
Our ports of stranded pride.

I will go north about the shaws
And the deep ghylls that breed
Huge oaks and old, the which we hold
No more than Sussex weed;
Or south where windy Piddinghoe’s
Begilded dolphin veers,
And red beside wide-banked Ouse
Lie down our Sussex steers.

So to the land our hearts we give
Til the sure magic strike,
And Memory, Use, and Love make live
Us and our fields alike —
That deeper than our speech and thought,
Beyond our reason’s sway,
Clay of the pit whence we were wrought
Yearns to its fellow-clay.

God gives all men all earth to love,
But, since man’s heart is small,
Ordains for each one spot shall prove
Beloved over all.
Each to his choice, and I rejoice
The lot has fallen to me
In a fair ground-in a fair ground —
Yea, Sussex by the sea!

 

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