"We have only one virginity, and where we lost it, there forever the heart remains" Is this Rudyard Kipling's?

Question

This is perhaps from one of Rudyard Kipling's books (vague memory) If so, which book?

Answer 1

The Virginity
Rudyard Kipling


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TRY as he will, no man breaks wholly loose
From his first love, no matter who she be.
Oh, was there ever sailor free to choose,
That didn’t settle somewhere near the sea?
Myself, it don’t excite me nor amuse
To watch a pack o’ shipping on the sea,
But I can understand my neighbour’s views
From certain things which have occurred to me.

Men must keep touch with things they used to use
To earn their living, even when they are free;
And so come back upon the least excuse—
Same as the sailor settled near the sea.

He knows he’s never going on no cruise
He knows he’s done and finished with the sea
And yet he likes to feel she’s there to use—
If he should ask her—as she used to be.

Even though she cost him all he had to lose,
Even though she made him sick to hear or see,
Still, what she left of him will mostly choose
Her skirts to sit by. How comes such to be?

Parsons in pulpits, tax payers in pews,
Kings on your thrones, you know as well as me,
We’ve only one virginity to lose,
And where we lost it there our hearts will be!

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Note: the poem is NOT about human love or lust: "his first love" refers to that place or way of life or chosen work that first attracts us and from which we never really separate ourselves. Perhaps it is those hills of Tennessee where I grew up and which I still call home, though I have never lived anywhere near there as an adult. Perhaps it is the work one may have done as a carpenter before graduating from college and entering an academic life; there is that carpenter [or gardener or seaman] always inside the professor or dean. Perhaps it is a chapel where one worshipped when life was simple and the future promising, a chapel that one has long since abandoned in a mature life of skepticism, or even cynicism. Always there is that quiet, peaceful chapel within.

Parsons, tax payers, kings have only one "first love" [i.e., vision of one's life], and in one way or another they will always "choose her skirts to sit by." Where we lost [our first love] there our hearts will [always] be.

The sailor always will seek the sea,
however far inland he may be.

Answer 2

It doesn't sound at all like the same man who wrote Gunga Din, If, and "the colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under the skin", but you never know. Kipling was young once. I could not find it under quotations.

Answer 3

It's SOME big liar. Could be Kipling.