Although the temple-bells urge, "Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!" the image of a Burmese girl "a-wastin' Christian kisses on an 'eathen idol's foot," a "bloomin' idol made o' mud," expresses the ignoranceand, it has often been said, the racist attitudesof the British soldier in foreign lands. The speaker, however, "sick o' wastin' leather on these gritty pavin'-stones, / An' the blasted Henglish drizzle [that] wakes the fever in my bones,'' has "a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land! / On the road to Mandalay." There, the Ten Commandments do not exist, he reminds himself: the romantic lure of a more primitive world free of industrialism and puritan morality propels the speaker's desire to return.
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In 1897, for Victoria's celebration of her sixtieth year as queen, Kipling composed his famous "Recessional" (following the form of a hymn sung when the clergy and choir retire from the chancel to the vestry after services), which cautions Britons against pride in imperialistic power:
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 | | God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine. . . .
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Allusions to Nineveh and Tyre, ancient cities no longer standing, provide a warning that the Empire itself could meet a similar fate, a possibility that haunted late-nineteenth-century Victorians:
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| | Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forgetlest we forget!
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The poem's deflation of British complacency in imperialist achievements grows in intensity as four stanzas end with the foreboding refrain "Lest we forget," the final stanza ending: "Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!"a curious conclusion to a poem celebrating the queen's Diamond Jubilee.
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At the same time, Kipling's vision of empire includes notions of self-imposed responsibility and of noble endeavors that test national character. "The White Man's Burden," written after the American occupation of the Philippines during the Spanish-American War (1898), and whose message soon became a basic premise of Western imperialism,
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