Mind your language
`BET you don't know the answer,' my husband said over the breakfast table, looking up from a pile of propaganda and bribes from drug companies. I for- bore to mention that that sort of tone from a patient would hardly go down well in the consulting room. What made it the more annoying was that I think he was right.
The post had brought an enquiry from the learned publisher Tom Hart- man, and if he doesn't know the answer the likelihood is that it is going to be a tricky question. On this occasion he had been discussing a poem by Kipling with his daughter (I wish Veronica would discuss anything half so realistic as poetry with me). The poem is called `Tomlinson', and on three occasions Kipling has the Devil say, 'I'm all o'er- sib to Adam's breed. . . . ' After those words, the lines end, 'that ye should give me scorn', 'that I should bid him go' and 'that I should mock your pain'. But what does Kipling mean? Sib ought to be simple enough. It means lin' or `amity' (obsolete) or 'with a claim to something' (Scottish). I think, by the way, that the common usage of siblings (in the sense of human brothers and sisters) is not a mere his- torical development but the adoption of a zoological term, mediated by sociolo- gy. Kipling would not have been trou- bled with that, nor with the Scottish sense, presumably. There is a common folk notion that people are either God's sib or the Devil's, and that idea fits the subject of `Tomlinson', a meeting with the Devil after death. But why is o'er hyphenated with sib, instead of with all or not hyphenated? Mr Hartman reads the line as meaning 'I'm all too closely related to mankind'; his daughter says that does not make sense in the con- text. Or can o'er-sib mean something like 'nurse' or 'foster-father'?
Kipling is not a simple poet, as far as judging how ironical he is being, or in what voice he speaks. But the words used are usually plain enough. The poem is in his collected verse. Can any- one produce a convincing exegesis, please?
Dot Wordsworth
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