Poem of the Month: May 2024
If, by Rudyard Kipling. LBC Poetry Series #2405
If
By Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
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 sonLatent Book Club Analysis
Kipling, once a British hero, more recently often derided, was born on December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India. His Indian childhood was significantly influential on the rest of his life. He was sent to England for his education but returned to India in 1882, where he worked as a journalist. Kipling's writing (notably not, though, in ‘If’) often reflected themes of imperialism, patriotism, and colonialism. However much attitudes have changed towards these aspects of his writing, one can be in no doubt of his power with language, and his literary genius. Many of Kipling’s poetry and stories stand out from their time as beacons, and remain rightfully admired. In 1907, Kipling became the first English-language writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
If is less controversial than many of Kipling’s other works, and is an exemplary piece of poetry. What is it? A call to modesty? A pean for calm, logical thinking? Comfort for the depressive, the egoist and the anxious? It is all this, and more. It is a consolation and an exhortation. It advises us to keep going, to sublimate the ego in victory, and not be destroyed by our failures in disaster. It is a wonderful poem.
The poem is four stanzas long, somewhat along the rhyme scene ABABCDCD, though the first stanza breaks this rule somewhat. The metre is classic iambic pentameter, lending it a Shakespearean tum-ti-tum feel.
The reader is engaged with the first conditional ‘if’. The usage of ‘you’ makes it personal, dragging the reader into the poem, in a common scenario - when others are losing their head and blaming it all on you. The immediacy of this situation is graspable by anyone from the errant schoolchild to the embattled businessman. We are with Kipling for this ride.
And where does the ride take us? Like Aristotle, Kipling seems to be advocating for moderation, virtue lining somewhere in the mean. That the poem is weighted in favour of moderation —towards reactions to you, rather than affairs necessarily of your own doing— speaks to the perceptions of others, a factor more relevant than ever in this social-media facing world. We are not in control of other’s reactions, the poem warns us. But we are in control of our responses to them. In this way, the poem is incredibly stoic.
In the final stanza, the peroration, the mode switches from the largely personal to the general. It switches to the grandiose. The form is at last revealed: ‘you’ll be a Man, my son’ is not a piece of misogny writ large. It is a didactic to Kipling’s son, a Victorian conception of how to live: neither prideful in victory nor given over to despair in defeat. But more than that - it speaks to something universal.
Life may be challenging, thinly-plotted, interspersed with random disaster, and disappointing. It may be all these things, but we all have within the resources to bear these, and their converse. If you can walk that line, as Kipling argues, ‘yours is the Earth, and everything that’s in it.’
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