Chil the Kite and the Day of Doom

Kites -- the bird of prey, particularly in the form of Garuda -- have been in the sync stream, which put in my mind Rudyard Kipling's poem "Night Song in the Jungle":

Now Chil the Kite brings home the night

  That Mang the Bat sets free -- 

The herds are shut in byre and hut, 

  For loosed till dawn are we.

This is the hour of pride and power, 

  Talon and tush and claw.

Oh, hear the call! -- Good hunting all 

  That keep the Jungle Law!

 I was reciting what I could remember of this to myself as I rode my motorcycle, and when I arrived home I sat down to read the nigh-unreadable Words of the Faithful. I turned a page and thought I saw the italicized word garuda in the text, but it turned out to be instead the somewhat visually similar gunwudu. (What I quote below is, believe it or not, a single sentence!)

Well, in that day the wandering dead spirits oft were captured, ensnared, or mislead [sic] into the deep places, Lower Airs of confusing orientation; whereby light itself may be held in awe, fear, reverence, for the faces it brings to memory, or the searing recall of one's deeds to those trusting; or beyond our knowledge, as strangers needless brought to grieve. So death by the sinister gunwudu, the fearful dread of a dark dragon form, disbanding and scattering its fumes across the town-settlement: Death indeed for all folk in those lands a terror beheld; and elves were little spoken of, and often in disregard; weak things, incapable of delivering even themselves  from Sauron's thralling reach.

Gunwudu appears only one other time in the text, in the grapholalia section in the back, where the author translates it as "Hell-dragon," apparently from gunn "dragon" and Udûn "Hell." The fact that I had initially misread the word as garuda struck me as a minor sync, because in "All the pebbles I have seen" I quoted the Donovan line "Dragon kite in the sky" and said it "got my attention because Garuda is a kite."

Now the really weird part. When I searched for the text of the Kipling poem so that I could include it in this post, I found it on the Kipling Society website, but my Yiddish-corrupted mind thought tush must surely be a misprint for tusk, so I decided to check another website for a second opinion. I clicked on the second link in my search results, Poetry Nook, and experienced a very bizarre glitch.

Although the address bar clearly said "https://poetrynook.com/poem/now-chil-kite-brings-home-night," the text the page displayed was not that poem but something entirely different I'd never heard of, a short poem numbered 66 and attributed to someone with the fake-sounding name Michael Wigglesworth:

Thus he doth find of all Mankind,
  that stand at his left hand,
No mother’s son but hath misdone,
  and broken God’s command.
All have transgress’d, even the best,
  and merited God’s wrath,
Unto their own perditi-on
  and everlasting scath.

This turns out to be the 66th stanza of a very long poem called The Day of Doom Or, a Poetical Description of the Great and Last Judgement, by the totally real New England Puritan poet Michael Wigglesworth.

I hit Ctrl-R, and the page loaded properly, displaying the Kipling poem. I didn't think to screenshot the glitched version, so you'll just have to take my word for it when I solemnly affirm that this really happened. I checked my browser history and verified that I had visited no other Poetry Nook page than the Chil the Kite one. Even more bizarrely, I have not been able to find the Wigglesworth stanza on the Poetry Nook site at all. I went through all 14 pages of search results for Wigglesworth, and it's not there.

Getting some other random poem instead of Chil the Kite would have been weird enough, but look again at the Kipling poem and the Wigglesworth stanza. They are each eight lines with precisely the same meter and rhyme scheme -- iambic tetrameter lines consisting of two rhyming parts, alternating with trimeters -- and they are even formatted in exactly the same way, with even-numbered lines indented by two spaces. (The only difference is that Kipling capitalizes the indented lines, while Wigglesworth does not.) As Debbie likes to say, What are the odds? Furthermore, the gundunwu sentence is, like the Wigglesworth stanza, about the spirits of the dead coming to a bad end.

I have absolutely no idea how to explain what happened.

Since the coincidences are already well into impossible territory anyway, I thought I might as well push my luck and see if the phrase "Day of Doom" appeared in any of Kipling's poetry. A search turned up "La Nuit Blanche," which begins thus:

I had seen, as the dawn was breaking
And I staggered to my rest,
Tari Devi softly shaking
From the Cart Road to the crest.
I had seen the spurs of Jakko
Heave and quiver, swell and sink.
Was it Earthquake or tobacco,
Day of Doom, or Night of Drink?

What follows is apparently an account of fever-dreams or delirium, with the poet's hallucinations including a "Blood Red Mouse" (cf. "Red dragons, red grasshoppers, and red mice"). Curious about the story behind it, I checked the Kipling Society's Readers' Guide, which has this to say:

This is an account of delirium, reminiscent of Kipling’s later “The Mother’s Son” which follows “Fairy-Kist” in Limits and Renewals. It also has an echo of “The Mad Gardener’s Song” by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898, author of Alice in Wonderland) and the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).

Seriously? The first thing they say about it is that it's reminiscent of "The Mother's Son"? As you can see above, the phrase "mother's son" appears in the 66th stanza of The Day of Doom and nowhere else in that very long poem.

La Nuit Blanche means "the sleepless night" in French. The Chil the Kite poem is about nocturnal animals spending the night hunting rather than sleeping.

Note added: I've looked up "The Mad Gardener's Song." I'm sure that I've never read the entire poem but that I have seen these lines quoted:

He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A Hippopotamus.

I can't think where, though. Rupert Sheldrake and Richard Dawkins for some reason come to mind as likely suspects, but I don't think it was actually either of them. I remember the key point was the repeated formula "He thought he saw . . . He looked again, and found it was . . . ," and that this was being used to make some point about cognition or perception. Can anyone help me out here?