They're Hanging Danny Deever in the Morning

"Danny Deever" is an 1890 poem by Rudyard Kipling, one of the first of the Barrack-Room Ballads. It received wide critical and popular acclaim, and is often regarded as one of the most significant pieces of Kipling's early verse. The poem, a ballad, describes the execution of a British soldier in India for murder. His execution is viewed by his regiment, paraded to watch it, and the poem is composed of the comments they exchange as they see him hanged.

The poem was first published on 22 February 1890 in the Scots Observer, in America later in the year, and printed as part of the Barrack-Room Ballads shortly thereafter.

It is generally read as being set in India, though it gives no details of the actual situation. Some research has suggested that the poem was written with a specific incident in mind, the execution of one Private Flaxman of The Leicestershire Regiment, at Lucknow in 1887. A number of details of this execution correspond to the occasion described by Kipling in the poem, and he later used a story similar to that of Flaxman's as a basis for the story Black Jack.

Kipling apparently wrote the various Barrack-Room Ballads in early 1890, about a year since he had last been in India, and three years since Flaxman's execution. Though he wrote large amounts of occasional verse, he usually added a note beneath the title giving the context of the poem. Danny Deever does not have any such notes, but "Cleared" (a topical poem on the Parnell Commission), written in the same month as Danny Deever, does. This suggests that it was not thought by Kipling to be inspired by a specific incident, though it is quite possible that he remembered the Flaxman case.

The form is a dialogue, between a young and inexperienced soldier (or soldiers; he is given as "Files-on-Parade", suggesting a group) and a more experienced and older NCO ("the Colour-Sergeant"). The setting is an execution, generally presumed to be somewhere in India; a soldier, one Danny Deever, has been tried and sentenced to death for murdering a fellow soldier in his sleep, and his battalion is paraded to see the hanging. This procedure strengthened discipline in the unit, by a process of deterrence, and helped inure inexperienced soldiers to the sight of death.

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