Published 1910
Poetry is not just for poetry buffs who read it day in and day out. Poetry is also for plain ordinary people who don’t know a rhyme from a couplet. Everyone can enjoy a beloved poem that strikes a cord, fills an emotion, or gives a small inspiration.
This poem If is a British epic favourite and one that parents should bribe their children to learn by heart and recite. It was written in Victorian times when war and males were at the forefront, but it applies to peace and girls just as well!
If by Rudyard Kipling written in 1895
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a man, my son!
Joseph Rudyard Kipling 1865 –1936, English poet, writer, tales for children including The Jungle Book, born in Bombay British India (now Mumbai), Nobel Prize in Literature 1907 (its youngest ever recipient). Much of his writing inspired by India and the military. Cousin to Conservative PM Stanley Baldwin
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