Seal Lullaby

Any contemporary study of Rudyard Kipling requires acknowledgement of Kipling’s racism and his support for colonialism and warfare. This lullaby’s peaceful reassurance introduces a short story where a display of force and violence delivers a community from an outside threat. In this story, Kotick, Kipling’s animal hero, is “white,” a rare occurrence in the seal world. The white seal fulfills his destiny as a leader by defeating other seals in a bloody battle, after which all the seals acquiesce to his will and follow him to the island where they are safe from human hunters. Violence and subjugation become the avenue to the community’s preservation.

The short story first appeared in the conservative London magazine National Review, a publication dedicated to the preservation of empire and the support of British martial superiority. The seal’s whiteness marks him as a leader among readers who supported colonial stewardship, a notion Kipling goes on to articulate in verse as the “white man’s burden.” Initial readers of the story would have likely seen the seals’ allegiance to the white seal Kotick as a testament to a colonial leader’s proper traits.

Examining the poem in the context of violence, empire, and race relations elevates certain aspects of the poem, like its comparison of seal children to human children. This comparison draws attention to one of Kipling’s chief contradictions: though he articulated a belief in the superiority of one race to another, he did not espouse any particular xenophobia, instead regarding cultural differences with childlike wonder at its best and paternalistic condescension at its worst. Like the story itself, “Seal Lullaby” illustrates the promise of protection to the vulnerable from a voice of strength, without any display of reason or acknowledgement of autonomy. In a lullaby, that power dynamic can be expected between a mother and child. In an allegory for colonialism, such an assertion bears more troubling dimensions.