An Almanac of Twelve Sports — Background and Themes

Kipling's Skeptical Voice

Across the almanac, Kipling undercuts the expected praise of sport. The March boating poem describes 'lean days and lives enforced pure' endured by oarsmen, framing their discipline as a penance rather than a glory. The racing poem (February) warns directly: 'there are lots of things besides, / And I should leave this play alone.' This cautionary tone recurs, as if the speaker has seen enough of the game to know its risks. The hunting poem's opening—'Certes it is a noble sport'—sounds like a concession before the speaker retreats to the armchair. Kipling lets the reader hear a voice that has participated but now prefers to observe from a distance.

Allusion and Literary Play

Kipling populates the verses with named characters and borrowed phrases. Jorrocks, the fictional Cockney grocer and huntsman from Surtees's novels, appears twice: once in the January poem and again in the February courting poem, where his dialect line is quoted verbatim. The hunting poem also name-drops 'Pigg, Binjimin and Arterxerxes'—other Surtees figures. These references assume a reader familiar with Victorian sporting fiction. The boating poem invokes 'The Pope of Rome' in a hypothetical comparison, while the closing lines of the June section introduce a candle metaphor: 'the price of the game is a candle— / One single flickering candle!' This literary density gives the almanac a layered texture, rewarding those who catch the allusions.

Structure and the Calendar Frame

Each month opens with a full-page calendar grid listing days of the week and dates for 1898. The poems sit opposite these grids, creating a visual and thematic pairing. The calendar pages are not decorative; they anchor the verses in a specific year and season. Kipling's poems often comment on the month's characteristic sport—hunting in January, coursing in February, racing in March, boating in April—but the connection is sometimes ironic. The racing poem, for instance, appears under March, yet its advice to 'leave this play alone' seems at odds with the calendar's promise of a fresh season. This tension between the orderly grid and the skeptical verse gives the almanac its distinctive character.

Diction and the Language of Restraint

Kipling's word choices in these poems favor the colloquial and the clipped. He uses contractions ('it's,' 'don't') and direct imperatives ('Reach down my Handley Cross again'). The vocabulary is plain but precise: 'quitted selle and swum for't' in the hunting poem uses archaic forms for a mock-heroic effect. The racing poem's line 'The horse is ridden—the jockey rides— / The backers back—the owners own' reduces the sport to a series of tautologies, stripping away glamour. This economical diction mirrors the almanac's format: each poem must do its work in a few lines. The result is a voice that sounds worldly, slightly weary, and unwilling to inflate the subject.

Readers approaching this almanac should attend to the interplay between text and image, though only the words are reproduced here. The poems reward slow reading: catch the allusions, note the shifts in tone from month to month, and consider how the calendar's regularity contrasts with the unpredictable outcomes of sport. Kipling's verses are best taken as a sequence of wry observations rather than a celebration—a record of one writer's amused, skeptical eye on the games people play.

That drizzly afternoon, I kept returning to Kipling’s wry shrugs at the season’s hunts—his poems made the victories feel hollow, the rituals somehow tender. Flipping pages, I noticed a similar teasing in his margins, almost a private joke. Later, at my desk, the memory of that irony nudged me toward A Fable for Critics — A Closer Reading, where the mockery felt familiarly affectionate, like rain on old slate.