"Recessional" is a poem by Rudyard Kipling, which he composed on the occasion of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897. The poem expresses pride in the British Empire, but also an underlying sadness that the Empire might go the way of all previous empires. Kipling recognizes that boasting and jingoism - faults of which he was often accused - were inappropriate and vain in light of God's dominion over the world.