Departmental Ditties, Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Poems (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

The poems collected here are mostly light verse—“barrack-room ballads,” Kipling called them—inspired by Kipling’s early adventures as a newspaperman in British colonial India. The first book Kipling published, Departmental Ditties (1886), emphasizes the universality of human experience and the cross-cultural ubiquity of the ignoble and tragicomic aspects of human character.