If you can keep your head when all about you…

These first lines set the pattern of “If—”: a single long sentence of conditions, each one a test of character. Keep your head when everyone around you is panicking and blaming you; trust yourself when all men doubt you, while making allowance for their doubt; wait without tiring, be lied about without lying, be hated without hating, “And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise”. Only in the last lines does the reward come: “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, / And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!”

The poem appeared in 1910 in Rewards and Fairies, a book of stories and poems for children. In his autobiography, Kipling said it was drawn from the character of Leander Starr Jameson, who led a failed raid into the Boer republic of the Transvaal at the end of 1895. Its address to “my son” is often read in the light of Kipling’s own son, John, killed in 1915 in the First World War.

If— (Rewards and Fairies), first lines, 1910

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