27 APRIL 1912, Page 31

[TO Tile EDITOR OF THII "5PRCTAT02.1 SIU,—Your reproduction last week

of a poem on shipwreck by an iceberg moves me to recall an apposite instance of the extra- ordinary prescience of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's poetic imagina- tion. In "The English Flag" he has the following lines :— "The North Wind blew From Bergen my steel-shod van- guards go;

I chase your lazy whalers home from the Disko floe ; By the great North Lights above me I work the will of God, And the liner splits on the ice-field or the Dogger fills with

The poem was published just twenty years ago in "Barrack Room Ballads," but it appeared before that in the National Observer.—I am, Sir, &o., HUNTER SMITH. South Manse, Crieff, Perthshire.