Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Friday, February 28, 2025.

Today's poem is a piece of light verse from Rudyard Kipling called The Camel's Hump.

Kipling seems to have been quite intrigued by the hump of a camel.

It also features in one of his just-so stories explaining how the camel got his hump.

And as in many just-so stories, those of Kipling and of others,

there's a certain amount of moralizing that happens at the end of that story.

And there's something similar going on here in this poem. But it's an intriguing treatment of

virtue and vice that is deceptively insightful. Kipling doesn't always strike you as the kind of man who has this word on the tip of his

tongue, and yet this is a poem that seems at its heart to be about the vice of acedia, what some

medievals called the noonday devil, this vice of dissipation that is perhaps best seen in our own day in the act of, wow, doom-scrolling

on a smartphone when you have a thousand other things you could be doing, ought to be doing,

when even going to sleep would be a better use of your time.

Kipling's speaker will say in the poem that this particular version comes when you have too

little to do, but maybe it would be just as fair to say it comes when you have too little sense

of what your duty is or what you ought to be doing at the moment.

One of my favorite anecdotes about the writer G.K. Chesterton is that once he was

wandering through the middle of London and had forgotten really where he was supposed to be

going and whether he had any pressing appointments. And so he stopped at a telegraph

shop and wired his wife the question, where ought I to be? He was something of an absent-minded

genius. And he waited around for her response, which was one word, home. I feel like we often, many of us, fall, if not geographically,

perhaps spiritually or attentionally into a similar conundrum. Here is Rudyard Kipling's

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