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Imperatives

Essential to the poem’s overall rhetorical effect is the speaker’s consistent use of verbs in the imperative mood. In grammatical terms, the imperative mood is used to issue commands, give instructions, or offer advice. The imperative is most clearly on display in the poem’s refrain, which repeats at the beginning of each stanza: “Take up the White Man’s burden” (lines 1, 9, 17, 25, 33, 41, and 49). Here, the speaker isn’t simply asking the reader to consider the idea of the white man’s burden; they are issuing a command, calling on us actively to adopt this burden. This use of imperative verbs continues throughout the poem, effectively extending the repeated command to take up the white man’s burden. For example, in line 3 the speaker commands, “Go bind your sons to exile,” and in lines 19–20 they tell us to “Fill full the mouth of famine / And bid the sickness cease.” These and other imperatives contribute to the poem’s exhortatory tone. They also show how the speaker assumes a position of authority, using the second-person pronoun “you” to issue commands to the politicians and ordinary citizens of white Western nations.

References to Agriculture and Cultivation

References to agriculture and cultivation appear throughout “The White Man’s Burden,” helping to establish a metaphorical link between the white man and beasts of burden. This link appears already in the opening stanza, where the speaker calls on Western imperial nations to “Send forth the best ye breed . . . To wait in heavy harness / On fluttered folk and wild” (lines 2–6). The image of the “heavy harness” is key here, as it implicitly likens the “sons” who are sent abroad to beasts of burden. In other words, these sons will take on the burden of the ox, whose heavy harness is attached to the plow used to prepare soil for planting. As metaphorical oxen, in their view, the best-bred men from the center of empire will till the soil of foreign lands, readying the ground for cultivation. The implied image of cultivation serves as a further metaphor for the development of civilization. Symbolically, the cultivation of land goes hand in hand with the elevation of culture. This agricultural metaphor returns in lines 33–36:

     Take up the White Man's burden—
         And reap his old reward, 
     The blame of those ye better,
         The hate of those ye guard.

Here, the speaker makes the ironic acknowledgment that, despite his efforts to improve the metaphorical soil of other lands, the only harvest he’s likely to “reap” is malcontent.

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