This week’s choice is the tragic story of Mad Carew and “The Green Eye of the Yellow God” by J. Milton Hayes.
There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
J. Milton Hayes (1884—1940)
There’s a little marble cross below the town;
There’s a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.
Poem 393. The Green Eye of the Yellow God
There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There’s a little marble cross below the town;
There’s a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.
He was known as “Mad Carew” by the subs at Khatmandu,
He was hotter than they felt inclined to tell;
But for all his foolish pranks, he was worshipped in the ranks,
And the Colonel’s daughter smiled on him as well.
He had loved her all along, with a passion of the strong,
The fact that she loved him was plain to all.
She was nearly twenty-one and arrangements had begun
To celebrate her birthday with a ball.
He wrote to ask what present she would like from Mad Carew;
They met next day as he dismissed a squad;
And jestingly she told him then that nothing else would do
But the green eye of the little Yellow God.
On the night before the dance, Mad Carew seemed in a trance,
And they chaffed him as they puffed at their cigars:
But for once he failed to smile, and he sat alone awhile,
Then went out into the night beneath the stars.
He returned before the dawn, with his shirt and tunic torn,
And a gash across his temple dripping red;
He was patched up right away, and he slept through all the day,
And the Colonel’s daughter watched beside his bed.
He woke at last and asked if they could send his tunic through;
She brought it, and he thanked her with a nod;
He bade her search the pocket saying, “That’s from Mad Carew,”
And she found the little green eye of the god.
She upbraided poor Carew in the way that women do,
Though both her eyes were strangely hot and wet;
But she wouldn’t take the stone and Mad Carew was left alone
With the jewel that he’d chanced his life to get.
When the ball was at its height, on that still and tropic night,
She thought of him and hurried to his room;
As she crossed the barrack square she could hear the dreamy air
Of a waltz tune softly stealing thro’ the gloom.
His door was open wide, with silver moonlight shining through;
The place was wet and slipp’ry where she trod;
An ugly knife lay buried in the heart of Mad Carew,
‘Twas the “Vengeance of the Little Yellow God.”
There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There’s a little marble cross below the town;
There’s a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.
This poem was written by Hayes in 1911 in just five hours, according to him. According to the Wikipedia article on Hayes, he said “It isn’t poetry and doesn’t pretend to be, but it does what it sets out to do.” It was written as a dramatic monologue for the music hall monologist Bransby Williams and has been misattributed to Kipling and frequently parodied and referenced.
It might not be great poetry in the vein of Keats or Tennyson but it is interesting because of Hayes’s commentary on the poem and the story. His style is to suggest ideas to the reader rather than lay out the details—“His name was Mad Carew. You’ve got the whole man there. The public will fill in the picture for you” and so he paints the whole picture by just telling us the outline.
We open with the end of the story and Hayes shows us it concisely—we can imagine the yellow idol and Victorian readers would have been familiar with the idea of Khatmandu as an exotic location somewhere in the Indian subcontinent as well as being familiar with little marble crosses due to the Victorian fascination with death.
The next stanza introduces us to the main characters: Mad Carew and the nameless daughter of the regiment’s colonel. We’re told that he got his nickname from the subs (subaltern officers) and that he was even bolder than they were prepared to admit but the rank and file were much impressed by him, and “the Colonel’s daughter smiled on him as well.”
We see that they love one another—passionately in his case, chastely in hers (a proper attitude for a Victorian woman)—and that preparations are being made for her 21st birthday and a celebration of special magnificence since a ball would have been a grand occasion even in England at the time: one held in India would have been quite spectacular, I’d imagine.
The besotted officer asks his paramour what she would like him to give her as a present and she flippantly tells him that the only thing that will satisfy her is “the green eye of the little Yellow God.” This evidently gives him pause and he considers the proposition long and hard—memories of the Indian Rebellion of 1857 would not yet have died out in 1911, and while the causes of the Rebellion were manifold, they were rooted in the frequently callous, ignorant, and inept attitude of the British rulers towards the people they ruled (see also Kipling’s poem Pagett, M.P.) Carew might be ‘mad’ but he perhaps isn’t insane enough to provoke another such uprising by pilfering from a religious shrine.
Carew is so absorbed in his reflections that the other officers mock him but for once he fails to return their sallies and instead sits for a while before making his decision and leaving the mess.
The next time we see him is as he stumbles into the compound, unaccountably battered and bleeding. We don’t hear his story: he is taken off for medical attention and is so exhausted that he sleeps through the day, tended by the woman who loves him. When he wakes, he asks for his clothes and she brings them to him but he tells her to look in the pocket of his tunic for a gift “from Mad Carew,/And she found the little green eye of the god.”
A little shocked at his audacity in bringing her what she had only asked for in jest, she rebukes him for taking her at her word and although she is deeply moved and on the edge of tears, she will not take the jewel from him and leaves him to reflect alone on his folly.
However, she is unable to get him out of her mind and when the ball is at a crescendo, she steals away from it to return to him and console him and as she heads for his quarters, she hears the soft strains of a waltz tune from the dance floor.
As she approaches his door, she finds it open wide and the floor is suspiciously wet (unusual in a hot and generally dry climate) but the moisture hasn’t blown in from the outside—it has come from the inside: the blood of Mad Carew, lying dead with a dagger in his heart and the jewel nowhere to be seen—truly “the Vengeance of the Little Yellow God.”
The last stanza is the same as the first, but now serves as a kind of epilogue to the story: we see the colonel’s daughter weeping for her lost love, whose death came about through her own foolishness in asking for the jewel and his recklessness in stealing it. Heedless of her sorrow, the Yellow God once more gazes sightlessly at its worshippers.
One of the dictums of M.R. James in his essay “Some Remarks on Ghost Stories” was:
Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it.
Hayes practices a great deal of reticence in his poem, allowing the listener or reader to construct their own view of the events told and so the story resonates more for being told sparingly.
The Wikipedia article gives a long list of cultural references to The Green Eye of the Yellow God but a short list should include The Goons who referenced it a number of times, John Lennon’s song Nobody Told Me, the 1938 film Sidewalks of London (AKA St. Martin’s Lane) where it is recited by Charles Laughton and Vivien Leigh and a Doctor Who episode. There is also a clever parody, “The Green Tie on the Little Yellow Dog”.
I like it because it tells a good story very well and learning more about it in researching it for this article has increased my respect for its author.
There’s a comedy performance of the poem by Graham and Jenny on Philip Joslin’s YouTube channel and a 1914 recording of Bransby Williams himself on Tim Gracyk’s channel.