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“The White Man’s Burden” consists of seven rhyming, eight-line stanzas. Each of these stanzas follows the same basic structure, beginning with the speaker’s repeated call for the reader to “take up the White Man’s burden” (lines 1, 9, 17, 25, 33, 41, and 49). Following this imperative, the speaker elaborates on what taking up this burden will entail. In most cases, the speaker describes just how challenging it will be to assume “the White Man’s burden.” The opening stanza, for example, encourages Western nations to send “the best ye breed” into exile, where they will labor like oxen under “heavy harness” (lines 2 and 5). At the top of the next stanza, the speaker renews the call to “take up the White Man’s burden,” before going on to explain that this burden is essentially self-sacrificing, as it aims “to seek another’s profit, / And work another’s gain” (lines 15–16). This basic structure—of an imperative followed by an elaboration of the challenge involved in fulfilling that imperative—continues throughout the rest of the poem.

At first glance, this two-part stanza structure may strike the reader as contradictory. Why, if “the White Man’s burden” is indeed so burdensome, should the reader be at all keen to take it up? If we were to focus on any one individual stanza, we likely wouldn’t feel convinced by the speaker’s argument. However, as we read through the poem as a whole, the claims presented in the individual stanzas begin to have a more cumulative effect. Indeed, they develop into a broader argument in which taking up “the White Man’s burden” isn’t merely a matter of drudgery. It’s also a matter of honor, and as such it presents a moral imperative. In other words, the repeating structure of the individual stanzas accumulates into a broader vision in which imperial expansion is characterized as an act of noble self-sacrifice. Such thankless service of the world’s less fortunate elevates the status of the agents of empire and ultimately affirms the supposed superiority of “the White Man.”

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