Rudyard Kipling was the first English recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature and the youngest at the time to be so rewarded. His children’s stories and poems have been enduring expressions of his times, many tied to India, the country of his birth.

Five Nations is a collection of poems covering the wide range of the British Kingdom at the time, though there is some debate as to what the Five Nations refer. There are two groups of poems in these volumes, unnamed poems and the service poems. Many of these have military themes and range over many wars of the British Empire. Volume II contains poems of the Five Nations and Service Poems.