Yareah Magazine

Rudyard Kipling's famous poem "If" PDF Print E-mail
Written by Zhang Huaming   
Wednesday, 01 July 2009 00:00
Zhang Huaming 
http://www.yareah.com/images/bandera1_p.gifTwo years ago there was suddenly revealed to us, no one seems to remember how, a new star out of the East. Not fewer distinguished men of letters profess to have “discovered” Mr. Kipling than there were cities of old in which Homer was born. Yet, in fact, the discovery was not much more creditable to them than it would be, on a summer night, to contrive to notice a comet flaring across the sky.
—Sir Edmund William Gosse (1) 
In his A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1941), T. S. Eliot evaluated Kipling as a “laureate without laurels, a “neglected celebrity, and “the arrival of a new book of his verses is not likely to stir the slightest ripple on the surface of our conversational intelligentsia.”(2)  Kipling was one of the most popular writers in English, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James famously said of him: “Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius that I have ever known.” In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, making him the first English language writer to receive the prize. Among other honors, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he rejected.
“If” is a poem written by Rudyard Kipling in 1896 and first published in the Brother Square Toes chapter of Rewards and Fairies, Kipling’s 1909 collection of short stories and poems. Kipling is said to have written the poem 'If' with Dr Leander Starr Jameson in mind, who led about five-hundred of his countrymen in a failed raid against the Boers, in southern Africa. The “Jameson Raid” was later considered a major factor in starting the Boer War (1899-1902). (3)
The poem is so well-known that the line, “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same" is written on the wall of the center court players' entrance at the British tennis tournament, Wimbledon. Moreover, Kipling stated himself that on finishing the poem “If”, it “escaped from the book, and for a while ran about the world”.
Once started, the mechanization of the age made them snowball themselves in a way that startled me. Schools, and places where they teach, took them for the suffering Young--which did me no good with the Young when I met them later. ('Why did you write that stuff? I've had to write it out twice as an impot.') They were printed as cards to hang up in offices and bedrooms; illuminated text-wise and anthologized to weariness. Twenty-seven of the Nations of the Earth translated them into their seven-and-twenty tongues, and printed them on every sort of fabric.(4)
The poem “If” is highly inspirational and motivating; it is perhaps even more relevant today than in Kipling’s time, as an ethos and a personal philosophy. It contains mottos and maxims for life, and the poem is also a blueprint for personal integrity, behavior and self-development. It tells us what we should do when we are doubted against, lied about, or hated by others; we can dream, but we should not make dreams “your mater”, we can think, but we should not make our thoughts “your aim”; when we “meet with Triumph and Disaster, we should “treat those two impostors just the same. When we lose all our winnings, we should “start again” from the very beginning, and “never breath a word” about the loss; and we should “hold on when there is nothing in you.” When talking with crowds, we should keep our virtue, or when walking with kings, we should not “lose the common touch.” If we can make “neither foes nor loving friends” hurt us, if we can treat each personal around us equally, if we can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds' worth of distance run,” we can be real Man.
Bill Cosby, a TV superstar, claims that he found comfort after the death of his son, Ennis, by reading the famous poem, “If”, in spite of the fact that he does not like Kipling’s views on race found in his other poems. He said that he didn’t want to memorize it. He just keeps reading it over and over. He said, “‘If’ was very calming, very calming. Because there were times when you wanted to yell out and just be a nasty person. Reading that paragraph over and over, I was able to suppress it.” (5) 
 
Notes
[1] B. C. (Brian Charles) Southam, Roger Lancelyn Green, Rudyard Kipling, Routledge, 105
[2] B. C. (Brian Charles) Southam, Roger Lancelyn Green, Rudyard Kipling, Routledge, 322
[5] JET. 1998. Vol. 93, No. 7, 63. Johnson Publishing Company 
References
1.         B. C. (Brian Charles) Southam, Roger Lancelyn Green, Rudyard Kipling, Routledge
4.         JET. 1998. Vol. 93, No. 7, 63. Johnson Publishing Company
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Bio:

My name is Zhang Huaming, and I also have an English name, Perry. In the year 1997, I graduated in a normal school in Gan Su, China, and became a high school English teacher. After 7 years of teaching, I went to Northwest Normal University to have my further education, majored in English, and got a Bachelor's Degree in 2006. In the same year, I passed the post-graduate exams in Northwest Normal University and will get my M. A in June, 2009. My major is English Language and Literature, orientation being English Literature. Meanwhile I have been teaching in several colleges as an external lecturer for 3 years.

http://tianyalit.blogspot.com/

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