Debits and Credits

Debits and Credits is a collection of fourteen stories, nineteen poems, and two scenes from a play[1] by Rudyard Kipling, a British writer who wrote extensively about British colonialism in India and Burma. In 1907, he became the first Englishman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. The collection was first published in 1926 and includes bitter and bleak stories about subjects such as adultery, war, death, disease, and the passage of time as a harbinger of sorrow. Most of the stories in this collection are framed by poems.[2]

Four of the poems that accompany the stories are whimsically presented as translations from the "Bk. V of Odes" by Horace but are actually poems by Kipling imitating the style of the Roman poet.