“without event/Day after wearisome day/Save for the little rodent cares that make/Me small as they”

For Poetry Monday, back to Kipling:

If—, Rudyard Kipling

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!


First published in Rewards and Fairies (1910) as the endnote to “Brother Square-Toes.” In context, it provides commentary on George Washington from the story, who takes an unpopular stand for the good of his new country, but it was originally written in 1895 (the same year as most of A Shropshire Lad) about his friend L.S. Jameson, shortly before his failed raid (at Cecil Rhodes’s behest) against the Boer government of Transvaal. I did not expect the reframing that last tidbit provides, and I’m still processing what to do with it.* The poem’s adoption by stiff-upper-lip-ism was already problematic, of course. And yet many phrases ring and ring again with me, such as those two imposters and that unforgiving minute.


* I also don’t know what to make of Kipling’s use of colons.

---L.

Subject quote from If Some Grim Tragedy, Ninna May Smith, who coined a brilliant phrase with that “little rodent cares.”