If—
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"If—" is a notable poem by Rudyard Kipling. It was written in 1895; the poem was first published in the Brother Square Toes chapter of Rewards and Fairies, Kipling's 1910 collection of short stories and poems. Like William Ernest Henley's Invictus, it is a memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism and the "stiff upper lip" that popular culture has made into a traditional British virtue. Its status is both confirmed by the number of parodies it has inspired, and by the widespread popularity it still draws amongst Britons (it was voted Britain's favourite poem in a 1995 BBC opinion poll).
According to Kipling in his autobiography Something of Myself (1937), the poem was inspired by Dr Leander Starr Jameson, who in 1895 led a raid by British forces against the Boers in South Africa, subsequently called the Jameson Raid. [link] This defeat increased the tensions that ultimately led to the Second Boer War. The British press, however, portrayed Jameson as a hero in the middle of the disaster, and the actual defeat as a British victory.
Reaction to the poem
"If—" holds the world record as the poem reprinted in more anthologies than any other. Kipling himself noted in Something of Myself that the poem had been "anthologised to weariness".
Despite the poem's immense popularity many critics deride "If—" as little more than doggerel and a list of aphorisms strung together. T. S. Eliot used it to argue that Kipling was only a versifier and not a real poet. George Orwell—an ambivalent admirer of Kipling's work who hated the poet's politics—compared people who only knew "If—" "and some of his more sententious poems", to Colonel Blimp. Other scholars point out that its long list of sufficient conditions is much more restrictive than necessary, and that far more general versions of its main result were already known in Kipling's time.
References to the poem
The most famous reference to this poem is the inscription of the lines "If you can meet with triumph and disaster / And treat those two imposters just the same" above the entryway to Centre Court at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, Wimbledon, London. The original version of this inscription appears briefly in Alfred Hitchcock's film Strangers on a Train, with the "two imposters" line showing symbolically during a conversation before the final match, even though the character of Guy Haines is supposed to be playing tennis in New England.
Another well-known popular culture reference to the poem occurs in the Francis Ford Coppola film, Apocalypse Now. The first three lines of the poem are quoted by the Dennis Hopper character, a photojournalist, immediately before quoting from the T.S. Eliot poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
The poem has had television and film references, in The Simpsons episode "Old Money" in which Grandpa Simpson quotes the lines pertaining "a game of pitch and toss" and the final line, "you'll be a man, my son." Homer's response is, "You'll be a bonehead!". It also features in the 2001 British Film "Mike Basset: England Manager", where Mike Basset recites the poem during a press conference.
References
[Chapter VII of Something of Myself]
External links
- [Free human-read audio recording] of "If—" at [Librivox]
- [Translation into Javascript code]
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