Verse for Thought
Verse for Thought
Used books and rediscovering Kipling
I spent two hours in the dingy basement of a consignment store a few blocks from my apartment yesterday. Two hours isn’t that long, considering how many books stuffed in every corner are down there. Usually, I block out an entire morning if I intend to go there, though yesterday I went on impulse and don’t regret it. I like the smell of used books almost as much as reading them.
Anyway, I found a paperback published in 1999 titled Favourite Verse, formerly published as The Anthology of Popular Verse. As you can probably guess by the ‘U’ in ‘favourite, it was published in the UK. The list of poets in this anthology is impressive. It would take too long to name even half of them. At four dollars, I am delighted with this purchase. I also bought copies of Rimbaud’s Collected Poems, Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (a translation by Vladimir Nabakov and his son Dimitri), and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. I’ve never read the former two. As soon as I finish reading The Captive & The Fugitive, Lermontov is next.
In Favourite Verse, I found a poem I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know. Rudyard Kipling’s If—. I was so exalted by this poem I had to share it with somebody. Even if you’re familiar with it, I doubt you’ll object to reading it again.
If—
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 walk 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!
—Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Verse for Thought
Maudlin is good.
I think living up to those examples is unlikely. The poets of old had fewer distractions; therefore, probably an abundance of self-reflection. I think a part of it is over the last century, we’ve shifted from a culture of character to a culture of personality. We’re less involved with our emotions, hence the ubiquitous mental health issues, and instead engage more with others, albeit largely digitally. Still, our culture is too focused on status and affirmation to bother pondering and evaluating their character and searching for deep meanings in our behaviors, attitudes, and existence.
All of this shows in the literature published in the last two decades or more. It seems as if it has been a gradual decline, beginning, and I am guessing, around the 70s. Big question mark there. It probably started at the height of post-modernism. Whenever that was. I have no idea.
I had come across this poem when working on poetry memorization with my homeschool group and was moved by it. They memorized the Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow which strikes a similar chord.