"Wireless" is a short story by

Rudyard Kipling Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( ; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936)''The Times'', (London) 18 January 1936, p. 12. was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work. ...

. It was first published in ''

Scribner's Magazine ''Scribner's Magazine'' was an American periodical published by the publishing house of Charles Scribner's Sons from January 1887 to May 1939. ''Scribner's Magazine'' was the second magazine out of the Scribner's firm, after the publication of ' ...

'' in 1902, and was later collected in ''

Traffics and Discoveries ''Traffics and Discoveries'' is a collection of poems and short stories by Rudyard Kipling, published by Macmillan and Co. of London and Doubleday, Page of New York in 1904. Stories (11): * The Captive * The Bonds of Discipline * A Sahibs' War * ...

''. The sister-poem accompanying it, ''Butterflies'' or ''Kaspar's Song in Varda'', Kipling claimed to have been a translation of an old Swedish poem (''from the Swedish of Stagnelius''), although this claim is unsubstantiated.

Plot

The narrator (Kipling) is visiting a chemist friend who is experimenting with short-wave radio. He is attempting to make contact with another enthusiast, several miles distant. They are passing a restless night, concocting the most marvelous

cocktails A cocktail is an alcoholic mixed drink. Most commonly, cocktails are either a combination of spirits, or one or more spirits mixed with other ingredients such as tonic water, fruit juice, flavored syrup, or cream. Cocktails vary widely across ...

from the chemicals at hand, and the narrator succeeds in drugging Mr Shaynor, the chemist’s assistant, who is suffering from last stage

consumption Consumption may refer to: *Resource consumption *Tuberculosis, an infectious disease, historically * Consumption (ecology), receipt of energy by consuming other organisms * Consumption (economics), the purchasing of newly produced goods for curren ...

. Shaynor has all the night been expressing his approval of a certain young lady in a toilet-water advertisement, and as he slips into a trance, he begins to indite poetry towards her. To the narrator's surprise, he begins to compose a poem of Keats; instead of merely writing the lines, he is in all the agonies of composition, and occasionally, in Kipling's opinion, improving on the poet's own work. The poem is ''

The Eve of St. Agnes ''The Eve of St. Agnes'' is a Romantic narrative poem of 42 Spenserian stanzas set in the Middle Ages. It was written by John Keats in 1819 and published in 1820. The poem was considered by many of Keats's contemporaries and the succeeding ...

''; in one instance Shaynor takes the "trite" line ::::::''And threw warm gules on Madeline’s fair breast'' (line 218) and changes it to ::::::''And threw warm gules on Madeline’s young breast'' which Kipling considers a change for the better. It seems to him that by the atmosphere auspicious for radio contact, Shaynor has somehow managed to connect with Keats, and the lines he writes are ''"the raw material...whence Keats wove the twenty-sixth, seventh, and eighth stanzas of his poem."''

Criticism

Some were critical of the story, saying it was ''"too full of crowded detail which, as it is structural, cannot be eliminated."'' Author

John Rhode Cecil John Charles Street (3 May 1884 – 8 December 1964), who was known to his colleagues, family and friends as John Street, began his military career as an artillery officer in the British Army. During the course of World War I, he became a ...

later used the story as the inspiration for the plot of his 1929 novel detective novel ''

The House on Tollard Ridge ''The House on Tollard Ridge'' is a 1929 detective novel by John Rhode, the pen name of the British writer Cecil Street. It marked the sixth appearance of the armchair detective Lancelot Priestley, who featured in a long-running series of novels ...

''.Evans, Curtis. ''Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961''. McFarland, 2014. p.66

References

{{Rudyard Kipling 1902 short stories Short stories by Rudyard Kipling Works originally published in Scribner's Magazine