If--
If--
("Brother Square-Toes"--Rewards and Fairies)
Original Text
Rudyard Kipling's Verse: Definitive Edition (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1940): 576-77.
1If you can keep your head when all about you
2 Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
3If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
4 But make allowance for their doubting too;
5If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
6 Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
7Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
8 And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
9If you can dream--and not make dreams your master;
10 If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;
11If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
12 And treat those two impostors just the same;
13If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
14 Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
15Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
16 And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
17If you can make one heap of all your winnings
19And lose, and start again at your beginnings
20 And never breathe a word about your loss;
21If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
22 To serve your turn long after they are gone,
23And so hold on when there is nothing in you
24 Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"
25If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
26 Or walk with Kings--nor lose the common touch,
27If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
28 If all men count with you, but none too much;
29If you can fill the unforgiving minute
30 With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
31Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
32 And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!
Notes
18] pitch-and-toss: "A gambling game in which the person who manages to throw a coin closest to a mark gets to toss all the coins, winning those that land with the head up" (OED). Back to Line
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2007
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