Yareah Magazine

  Barbara Fitz Vroman 

            Every June when the graduation announcements begin to pour in I go to my file and find Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If”.  More than the money I tuck into each card of congratulations, I feel, is my gift of  Kipling’s inspired words.

            Where else does one find instructions of all the elements of a valiant and courageous life so succinctly expressed? The only line I have always questioned is: if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you.  It would take a granite heart without emotion to achieve that,

and granite hearts are not the stuff of happy, well-lived lives.

            Nor I am sure did Kipling himself possess such a heart or he could never have given the world the master pieces he produced. He was one of the most great- hearted men, and one of  the most brilliant. Perhaps it was in his early childhood in India that he imbibed what the ancient wise-men there knew and quantum physics is only recently revealing to our generation, that what we think, we create. He gave this realization to the world in the most charming way, in his Just So stories for children.

            When the Elephant found he needed a longer nose, or the giraffe found he needed a longer neck, the very longing within the animal caused deeds to come about that produced the needed change. Darwin was later to document this fact with irrefutable information.

            He was before his time in other ways, such as realizing that the color of a man’s skin was not the measure of a man, though perhaps he hadn’t got all the way free of the prejudices of his time, for his marvelous poem about a dark man called Gunga Din, which preached this

message, nevertheless, ended with saying Gunga Din’s heart was white within.

            But all his wisdom, and his understanding of virtue, could not save Kipling from his own tragedy. Not long ago, I watched a television drama which revealed the saddest of truths. The philosophy in his beautiful poem “IF”, surely written with his own son in mind, back-fired. The boy, who had severe myopia and was turned away from serving in the World War 1 because of his thick glasses, was determined to go. Not perhaps because that was his own calling, but to please his father, to live up to the gallant coda the older Kipling had penned.

            The well-connected father pulled strings to get his son into service in spite of his poor eye-sight. The young man died on the battle-field, partly because his glasses had got lost or broken.

            I wished I had not seen the drama, it made me so sad, for Kipling. I would have wanted better for this great and good man, who meant well, but like all of us had his weaknesses.

            And every year when graduation comes along I still slip, “IF’ into the cards I send.

Because when life bruises me and sometimes not just bows my head, but brings me to my knees, I wrap myself in his well-remembered words, “If you can meet with Triumph andDisaster/ And treat those two imposters 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 force your heart and nerve and sinew/ To serve you long after they are gone/ And so hold on when there is nothing in you/ Except the Will which says to them, “Hold on!....”, somehow it helps to rise me to my feet again.