For you all. "If" - a poem by Rudyard Kipling

[LuckyCharms]

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!

[KT2000]

1. Robert Penn Warren

[ After a litany of disappointments, betrays, and grief, he concludes with this ]

....Until you

Remember surprisingly that

common men have done good deeds.

Until it

Grows on you that, at least, God
Has allowed us the

grandeur of certain utterances.

[LuckyCharms]

2. Thank you, KT2000

[debm55]

3. Beautiful poem. Thank you for sharing with us, LuckyCharms.

[calimary]

4. GREAT one!

Thanks for posting it, LuckyCharms!

[Figarosmom]

5. Thank you, always liked this one😊

[Donkees]

6. To be a 'Man' in prewar England was to maneuver inside an armored suit of gender conventions.

To be a “Man” in prewar England was to maneuver inside an armored suit of gender conventions. To be Rudyard Kipling’s son was to be trapped in a generational tragedy.

He’d never fought in the trenches himself, but “when the drums [began] to roll” for the Great War, he helped John march—pulling strings to maneuver his eager but severely myopic son past the army’s eyesight requirements. John went missing in the Battle of Loos in 1915 and was confirmed dead two years later.

As a celebrity author, Kipling remained an official booster of the war; as a grieving father, he sank into a deep bitterness. “Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking,” wrote Orwell, whose essay never mentions John’s death. “Somehow history had not gone according to plan.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70303/iffy