The Hunting of the Snark favourite young friends; in a typical fashion, he signed them with short poems, many of them acrostics of the child's name. He dedicated "The Hunting of the Snark" to Chataway, whom he had befriended in summer 1875 at the English seaside town Sandown on the Isle of Wight. He finished the dedication a month after befriending her, a double acrostic poem that not only spelled out her name, but contained a syllable of her name in the first line of each stanza. The stanza of his first draft concluded ""Rest on a friendly knee, the tale to ask / That
The Betrothed (poem) The Betrothed (poem) "The Betrothed" is a poem by Rudyard Kipling, first published in book form in "Departmental Ditties" (1886). It is a tongue-in-cheek work by the young bachelor Kipling, who affected a very worldly-wise stance. In it, he takes as his epigraph the report of evidence in a breach of promise case, ""You must choose between me and your cigar"". The poem simply has a narrator musing on the difference between his fiancée Maggie and his habit of smoking cigars: He weighs up Maggie's looks, and what she will be at fifty; the limitations of monogamy against "a harem