IF it is true that familiarity breeds contempt, it would explain the contradictions that surround Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem If-. On the one hand it is one of the most popular and best-known poems in the English language. On the other this enormous popularity has done it a disservice. For instance, despite appearing in many anthologies of verse, If- is excluded from The New Oxford Book of English Verse. Instead, editor Helen Gardner selects Kipling’s Mandalay, Danny Deever, Cities and Thrones and Powers, The Way through the Woods, and the imperialistic Recessional.
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), poet, short-story writer and novelist, was born in Bombay. He was sent to England to be educated, and then returned to India at the age of 17, where he rapidly made a name for himself as a superb journalist and caustic observer of Anglo- Indian society. He returned to England in 1889, where he achieved celebrity status with his poems of army life, Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), which established him as an unofficial spokesman for the then much-despised British soldier, and for the British Empire.
From this period until his death, Kipling’s reputation was to vary according to the political climate. Kipling was inclined to be crudely chauvinistic, and to display unpleasant arrogance towards peoples ruled by or hostile to Britain, though he also emphasised British responsibility for the welfare of the governed peoples. Be that as it may, it is interesting to note that his most enduringly popular works are two of his children’s books, The Jungle Book (1894-5) and the Just So Stories (1902), the latter of which Kipling illustrated himself.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. Kipling’s poetry is striking for its success in using, vividly and musically, popular forms of speech such as the dramatic monologue and ballad tradition. He was also able to write poetry appropriate for public occasions and capable of stirring the feelings of a large public. His poetry is generally simple in its components but, when it rises above the level of doggerel, strong in its impact. It needs to be read in selection.
Which brings us back to If-. The poem first appeared in Kipling’s less celebrated children’s book Rewards and Fairies (1910). Apart from its over-quoted opening lines ‘If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you’, its most memorable lines are in the final stanza: 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! In his autobiography Kipling was candid both about the poem and its success. He felt that the lines had been “anthologised to weariness” and claimed that they had done him no good with “the Young”, who were always complaining to him that they had to write them out “as an impot”, (ie. an ‘imposition’, public school parlance for lines written out as a form of punishment)! As for the content of the poem, he said that it “contained counsels of perfection most easy to give”.
And that is the point: The many conditions that make up the single thirty-two line sentence of the poem are, of course, impossible to fulfil. No one gets to be ‘a Man’ if these are the requirements. Though admirable in themselves, and worth aiming at, the standards required are unattainable; this is the test that everyone fails… Not so much an inventory of wholesome duties as an accessible ‘metaphysical’ poem – Kipling was influenced by John Donne’s poem The Undertaking – If- is both exuberant and solemn in its depiction of the ethical battlefield facing the young adolescent.
As so often with Kipling’s poetry, the overall impression of If- is far more interesting than its individual cliches. Despite outmoded references to ‘knaves’, ‘pitch-and-toss’, ‘Kings’ and ‘Man’, the poem – like Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken – has an appeal that transcends time and place. Indeed, in today’s hard-edged world it is every bit as inspirational and relevant as it was in the long-vanished world of 1910.
