Kipling in “The Camel’s Hump” is illustrating the repercussions of lack of self-discipline in a humorous way. Discuss.

 

In his short poem “The Camel’s Hump”, the Victorian poet Rudyard Kipling underscores the need for self-discipline at both personal and public level in a humorous way. The type of humour Kipling employs is called dark humour. The reader may laugh but the laughter has a dark undertone.

 

The poem has 7 stanzas, rhyming abcb bbddb efgf hbaab ijkj lbaab bbaab. In the poem, Kipling juxtaposes two images. First, he directs the readers’ attention to a camel with a hump displayed at the [London] Zoo. Next, he says that people who do not exerts themselves physically would also get what he called a “black and blue” “cameelious hump”. The image of people with a camel-like hump evokes humour, at least initially. However, he says that this fate is not limited to any age group:  

Kiddies and grown-ups too-oo-oo,
If we haven't enough to do-oo-oo,
We get the hump-
Cameelious hump-
The hump that is black and blue!

The fact that anyone can fall prey to this disease would certainly create a sense of unease in the mind of the reader.

The reason for what the poet calls “the cameelious hump” is obviously lack of self-discipline born out of laziness. People of all ages either “sit still” or “frowst with a book by the fire”. The result is the black and blue hump. The colours “black and blue” stand for pain, disease and death. It is this reference to pain, disease and death that adds a sense of profound unease to the poem which sounds humorous on the surface.

Next, the poet suggest the only cure for the dreaded hump: “to take a large hoe and a shovel also,/ [a]nd dig till you gently perspire”. If one does that, then the sunshine, the wind and the Djinn in the garden would magically get rid of the dreadful protrusion. If one did not heed to this advice, a dreadful fate awaits that person. He would end up on display similar to the camel in the Zoo being gawked at by healthier people who would look at him as an oddity or a freak.

Looking at the socioeconomic message of the poem, the poem is about a worldview upheld by Kipling’s contemporaries. The poem was written at the very height of the British Empire. At the time, Britain had become very rich because of the wealth pumped into it by its many colonies. As a result, many people led sedentary leisurely lives which made them rotund and unhealthy. This lifestyle was at odds with the basic philosophy on which British society was built: Protestant work ethics.

Protestant work ethics prescribed a simple life, frugality and hard work which required British people to be self-disciplined. Many people in Britain, including Kipling, believed that it was this life-style based on self-discipline that enabled Britain to be a great empire. In the poem, Kipling airs his worry about lack of discipline in people leading to the decline of the British Empire resulting in them being captured and put on display by another stronger and more disciplined nation in the future similar to the way they have displayed all the exotic creatures displayed at zoos.