If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat…

The lines come in the second stanza of “If—”, Kipling’s poem of advice to a son. Just before, the poet asks him to dream without making dreams his master, and to think without making thoughts his aim. Just after come harder trials: hearing the truth you have spoken “Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools”, or watching the things you gave your life to broken, and stooping to rebuild them “with worn-out tools”. Triumph and Disaster, capitalised like characters in an allegory, are both “impostors”: neither tells the truth about a person’s worth.

Published in 1910 in Rewards and Fairies, the poem became a byword for British stoicism, and was voted the nation’s favourite poem in a BBC poll in 1995. These two lines are inscribed above the players’ entrance to Centre Court at Wimbledon, where the players pass beneath them on their way onto the court.

If— (Rewards and Fairies), stanza 2, 1910

Checked word for word in the work itself.

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