“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same”
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 wornout 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!
Funny that you write “if” instead of “of” in the title of a post about a book called “IF”
what if I tell you this was not intentional? I just realized this. But I can pretend this was done on purpose as a joke.
I love what Kipling wrote, but the man was amazingly sexist and racist.
But if you force some modern sensibilities on the poem, “If” is pretty great.
What, more so than was typical for the time?
He was considered conservative in his time, although in a way that doesn’t really exist any more, opposing social change whatever the source. He strongly opposed fascism for instance.
I don’t think he was particularly racist for his time. He partly gets that reputation because he was writing about foreign cultures for readers who had zero understanding of them, when his own understanding came from being part of the British empire.
Reading what he says about other cultures is very interesting specifically because of that. And on top of that, he’s extremely eloquent.
It’s a pretty rare glimpse into the mind of a man who was very educated, and wellspoken and who saw everyone who wasn’t white as truly, and regrettably, lesser. And yet despite being so horribly racist, he did feel strong obligation that these poor almost-humans needed help, in his colonizing, appropriating way.
Its fucking terrible, but there aren’t people like that anymore. There isn’t someone who will go “yeah, all of them [slurs] are dumb fucking shits, but damnit we whites owe it to help em out!”
And no, ffs, let’s not bring that back. But that doesn’t make it less fascinating.
Also, we’re very used to the most of the insulting and degrading racism of today, but Kipling had very much a condescending racism that’s pretty rare today. Something like Gunga Din is praising and elevating someone… Because his work as a water carrier is very impressive for someone so inferior.
yes, I heard and read about his racist and sexist stories as well. agree.
