"By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' eastward to the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me..."
'Mandalay' is a poem by the late British writer Rudyard Kipling, written and first published in 1890. It was first collected in Barrack-Room Ballads, and Other Verses' (1892). The poem is set in colonial Burma, then part of British India. The protagonist is a Cockney working-class soldier who, once back in a gloomy and oppressive London, recalls the time when he felt free and had a Burmese girlfriend, now unattainably far away.
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) is often regarded as the unofficial Laureate of the British Empire. Yet his cutting verse and prose reveals a ferociously independent figure, at times violently opposed to the dominant political and literary tendencies of his age. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907 "in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration which characterize the creations of this world-famous author."
