Background of the Poet

Joseph

Rudyard

1865, Mumbai,

Kipling

was

Indiadied Jan.

18,

born Dec.

30,

1936, London,

Eng.), English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

chiefly

remembered

for

his

celebration

of

British imperialism, his tales and poems of British

soldiers in India, and his tales for children. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1907.
Life
Kiplings father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an artist and scholar who had
considerable influence on his sons work, became curator of the Lahoremuseum, and is
described presiding over this wonder house in the first chapter of Kim, Rudyards most
famous novel. His mother was Alice Macdonald, two of whose sisters married the highly
successful 19th-century painters Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter, while
a third married Alfred Baldwin and became the mother of Stanley Baldwin, later prime
minister. These connections were of lifelong importance to Kipling.
Much of his childhood was unhappy. Kipling was taken to England by his parents
at the age of six and was left for five years at a foster home at Southsea, the horrors of
which he described in the story Baa Baa, Black Sheep (1888). He then went on to the
United Services College at Westward Ho, north Devon, a new, inexpensive, and inferior
boarding school. It haunted Kipling for the rest of his lifebut always as the glorious
place celebrated in Stalky & Co. (1899) and related stories: an unruly paradise in which

the highest goals of English education are met amid a tumult of teasing, bullying, and
beating. The Stalky saga is one of Kiplings great imaginative achievements. Readers
repelled by a strain of brutalityeven of crueltyin his writings should remember the
sensitive and short sighted boy who was brought to terms with the ethos of this
deplorable establishment through the demands of self-preservation.
Kipling returned to India in 1882 and worked for seven years as a journalist. His
parents, although not officially important, belonged to the highest Anglo-Indian society,
and Rudyard thus had opportunities for exploring the whole range of that life. All the
while he had remained keenly observant of the thronging spectacle of native India, which
had engaged his interest and affection from earliest childhood. He was quickly filling the
journals he worked for with prose sketches and light verse. He published the verse
collection Departmental Ditties in 1886, the short-story collection Plain Tales from the
Hills in 1888, and between 1887 and 1889 he brought out six paper-covered volumes of
short stories. Among the latter were Soldiers Three, The Phantom Rickshaw (containing
the story The Man Who Would Be King), and Wee Willie Winkie (containing Baa,
Baa, Black Sheep). When Kipling returned to England in 1889, his reputation had
preceded him, and within a year he was acclaimed as one of the most brilliant prose
writers of his time. His fame was redoubled upon the publication in 1892 of the verse
collection Barrack-Room Ballads, which contained such popular poems as Mandalay,
Gunga Din, and Danny Deever. Not since the English poet Lord Byron had such a
reputation been achieved so rapidly. When the poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson died
in 1892, it may be said that Kipling took his place in popular estimation.

In 1892 Kipling married Caroline Balestier, the sister of Wolcott Balestier, an

American publisher and writer with whom he had collaborated in The Naulahka (1892), a
facile and unsuccessful romance. That year the young couple moved to the United States
and settled on Mrs. Kiplings property inVermont, but their manners and attitudes were
considered objectionable by their neighbours. Unable or unwilling to adjust to life in
America, the Kiplings returned to England in 1896. Ever after Kipling remained very
aware that Americans were foreigners, and he extended to them, as to the French, no
more than a semi exemption from his proposition that only lesser breeds are born
beyond the English Channel.
Besides numerous short-story collections and poetry collections such as The
Seven Seas (1896), Kipling published his best-known novels in the 1890s and
immediately thereafter. His novel The Light That Failed (1890) is the story of a painter
going blind and spurned by the woman he loves. Captains Courageous (1897), in spite of
its sense of adventure, is often considered a poor novel because of the excessive
descriptive writing. The Kim (1901) - although essentially childrens book, it must be
considered a classic. The Jungle Books (1894 and 1895) is a stylistically superb
collection of stories linked by poems for children. These books give further proof that
Kipling excelled at telling a story but was inconsistent in producing balanced, cohesive
novels.
In 1902 Kipling bought a house at Burwash, Sussex, which remained his home
until his death. Sussex was the background of much of his later writingespecially
in Puck of Pooks Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910), two volumes that,
although devoted to simple dramatic presentations of English history, embodied some of

his deepest intuitions. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first
Englishman to be so honoured. In South Africa, where he spent much time, he was given
a house by Cecil Rhodes, the diamond magnate and South African statesman. This
association fostered Kiplings imperialist persuasions, which were to grow stronger with
the years. These convictions are not to be dismissed in a word; they were bound up with a
genuine sense of a civilizing mission that required every Englishman, or, more broadly,
every white man, to bring European culture to the heathen natives of the uncivilized
world. Kiplings ideas were not in accord with much that was liberal in the thought of the
age, and as he became older he was an increasingly isolated figure. When he died, two
days before King George V, he must have seemed to many a far less representative
Englishman than his sovereign.
CONNECTION OF THE AUTHORS LIFE WITH IF
"If" is a poem about stoicism, about being strong in the face of pain, sadness, bad
luck, hard times, etc. and continuing to move forward without throwing a fit or acting up.
It is about being patient, about finding a happy medium between extremes of emotion.
The speaker of Kipling's poem, for example, talks about losing everything but starting
over without crying about it, about watching other people lie and hate and choosing to not
stoop to their level, about not letting friends or enemies hurt you, and many other things.
To put it simply, "If" is a kind of primer, 32 lines of advice about how to be stoic.
In fact, you could say it's a poem about how to become a gladiator in the coliseum of life.
http://www.britannica.com/biography/Rudyard-Kipling

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, dont deal in lies,
Or being hated, dont give way to hating,
And yet dont look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dreamand not make dreams your master;

If you can thinkand 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 youve 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 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 thats in it,

Andwhich is moreyoull be a Man, my son!
Source: A Choice of Kipling's Verse (1943)

ELEMENTS OF POETRY
STANZAS
Stanzas are a series of lines grouped together and separated by an empty line from
other stanzas. They are the equivalent of a paragraph in an essay. One way to identify a
stanza is to count the number of lines. This poem has a total of thirty two lines that
consist of four octaves. Octave contains eight lines therefore each paragraph is octave.
FORM
This poem is a didactic poem in that it is meant to give instruction or advice,
which is to teach a man what the virtues of leadership are. It is a paradox written as a
contradiction. For example, the fourth stanza advises the ability to neither walk with
Kings nor lose the common touch and to allow all men count with you, but none too
much. This is used by Kipling to show the complexity of virtuous behavior. The
language in the poem is informal, or colloquial.

THEME
STOICISM
Stoicism was originally a philosophical movement that taught that true sages did
not experience emotions like fear and anger, that the truly wise man would be impervious
to misfortune. "If" is a poem all about this philosophy. The speaker tells his listener not to

tell anybody when he loses all his money, not to give in to hate, not to allow his friends or
enemies to hurt him, and so on. It is a poem that essentially says that it is only by being
stoic (by having a "stiff upper lip") that a boy can become a man, and that a man can
master the universe. Okay, so the poem is a little rigid and maybe a little unrealistic at
times, but the basic premisethat success is based on one's ability to master negative
emotions and to maintain balance in one's liferings only too true.
SOUND PATTERNS

RHYME SCHEME

The poem is written in four stanzas with eight rhyming lines consisting of the rhyme
scheme ababcdcd.
If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breath 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!"

RHYTHM AND METER

If is written in iambic pentameter consisting of five feet with with two syllable
units. The syllable units consist of the first being unstressed and the second being
stressed.
u /

/ u/

If you can keep your head when all about you

Now, if you take a peek at the other lines in the poem, you might notice a pattern.
All of the even-numbered lines (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, etc.) contain 10 syllables and are textbook
iambic pentameter but what about the odd-numbered lines (1, 3, 5, 7, etc.)? Let's look at
line 25, for example:
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue.
Notice, that everything is cool up until that last word, "virtue," where we have
what appears to be the beginning of another iamb but poof, we're on to the next line.
The odd-numbered lines have an extra syllable. There are many fancy terms for
this oh-so-peculiar phenomenon. Sometimes the syllable is called "extrametrical,"
sometimes "hypermetrical," and, when people want to be really fancy, they will call the
whole line "hypercatalectic" .There are all sorts of reasons why a poet would want to add
an extra syllable. Maybe Kipling started writing and realized that line 1 had an extra
syllable and decided to roll with it. Maybe he had more to say in the odd-numbered lines.
Maybe he just wanted to change things up. These are all good reasons, and we will never
know for sure why the odd-numbered lines are hypercatalectic.
WORD SOUNDS

If we had to describe the sound of this poem in three words, they would be: "runon sentence." Okay, so that's a little harsh, but if you think about how run-on sentences
work, you'll see what we mean. If you've ever encountered a run-on sentence, you know
they tend to go on and on and on.
The most widely-used literary technique in this poem is anaphora, which is the
repetition of the same word, or series of words, at the beginning of successive lines. More
than anything else, it is the anaphora in this poem that gives it a run-on feel. Take a peek
at lines 9-11,
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
Notice all of those phrases: "If you can," "If you can," "If you can." Anaphora
goes down in lines 18-20 as well:
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
Part of the reason the poem is so repetitive, and sounds so much like a run-on is
because it's a poem spoken by a father to a son. Repetition works well on kids, especially
if you're trying to teach them something. While at times all the anaphorathe "if, if, if"
and the "and, and, and"gets a little tedious, but if you were trying to give a young

person a mini-lecture about how to become a man and conquer the world, you might
resort to this strategy, too.
LITERARY DEVICES:

FIGURES OF SPEECH; SYMBOLISM, IMAGERY,

ALLEGORY

LOSS, DEFEAT, AND DESTRUCTION

For a poem that, at the end of day, seems pretty triumphant or uplifting, there sure are
plenty of references to things getting broken, lost, and destroyed. All these references
reiterate the idea that things don't always go as planned. That's just life. But none of these
things are permanent. There are ways to overcome life's setbacks and defeats, and this
emphasizes the importance of rebuilding after a loss.
The lines 1-2: "To lose one's head" is a metaphor for going crazy, completely losing
it, and it's a pretty common thing. The lines 11-12: "Triumph and Disaster" represent
classic personification. Triumph and Disaster isnt people, and they aren't really
impostors, but both success and failures are dangerous. It can be really easy to get carried
away by the emotions they cause. The lines 13-14: A truth isn't literally "twisted," so this
is a metaphor for people misinterpreting one's words in order to deceive, or "trap. The
lines 15-16: Some things might be literally "broken," but this could also just be a
metaphor for things changing, not going as planned, and completely imploding.
The lines 17-20: To "risk" and "lose" all one's winnings is a metaphor for taking any
kind of chance. Life is about taking risks, that's for sure, and losses will happen. One can
always start over, however, and that's what matters. The lines 21-24: "Gone" is here a

metaphor for exhaustion, fatigue, or something like that. The body's can be defeated, but
the powerful Will is strong enough to overcome that defeat.

NEGATIVES (NO, DON'T, NEVER)

If this poem is anything, it's a poem about what not to do if you want to be a man.
Seriously, at times the poem assumes a kind of "don't do this, and never do that, and you
better not do that" tone. "If" is a very negative poem, at least in that sense. Thank
goodness that all the things it says not to do seem like things that one shouldn't do
anyway (give into hate, lie, get worked up about stuff rather than fix them, etc.). In the
end, it's what one doesn't do that matters more than what one doesor something like
that.
In the line 5: The speaker stresses the importance of patience by saying the speaker
will be a man if he cannot be tired by waiting. The lines 6-7: These lines display the
speaker's taste for anaphora, the repetition of the same word or words in successive lines,
and suggest that the speaker's son shouldn't deal in lies or give way to hating. The line 8:
The speaker's son shouldn't look too good, or talk too wisely. The lines emphasize the
importance of not coming across as a know-it-all, or as a self-righteous saint.
In the lines 9-10: We encounter anaphora again as the speaker emphasizes dreaming
and thinking, but this time it's about not becoming a slave to one's dreams or thoughts.
The lines 19-20: "Never breathe a word" means "say nothing." One doesn't really breathe
words, per se, so this is a metaphor for talking. It is also a metaphor for being strong, for
being able to endure disappointment without getting too upset about it. The line 27: Here
we get a neither-nor phrase, one that stresses the importance of not letting friends or

enemies hurt you. This too is a metaphor for being strong, for being able to not let things
get to you.

STRENGTH AND ENDURANCE

If "If" is anything, it is a poem about endurance, about persevering, even in hard

times. And we don't mean just literal endurance, as in the final stanza's discussion of
distance running. There is also emotional, or figurative enduranceall that business
about holding on, and finding the will to continue, even when one's body feels like it's
about to break. In many ways, "If" is a poem about strength, and at times it seems like its
underlying theme is "only the strong survive."
In the line 5: The speaker talks about the importance of not getting tired of waiting. If
nothing else, this line emphasizes the importance of patience, itself a form of endurance.
The lines 13-14: The word "bear" here means something like "endure" or "put up with,"
while the whole idea of having one's truth twisted is a metaphor for abuse and misuse of
one's words. The lines 15-16: "Watch" means literally watch, but it's also a metaphor for
endurance or being able to suffer through the pain of watching what is near and dear be
destroyed.
Lines 21-24: These lines anticipate that "distance run" business of the final stanza, but
also stress the importance of the Will. The word "gone" in the description of nerves and
sinews seems to be a metaphor for exhaustion, or fatigue. Lines 29-30: You get only sixty
seconds in a minute, so you better make the most of it. The phrase "sixty seconds' worth
of distance run" is a metaphor for making the most of something or trying as hard as you
can. In other words: carpe diem.

OPPOSITES AND EXTREMES

"If" is a poem of extremes. If one thing is for certain, it's that whenever the speaker
wants to make a point he goes from one extreme to the other. In stanza 2 there's "Triumph
and Disaster," breaking and rebuilding in the third stanza, and then friends and foes, kings
and commoners in the fourth stanza. These extremes are in the poem because the speaker
wants to stress the importance of the middle. If his listener wants to be a man, and to have
complete possession of the earth, well, he's got to learn to stay in the middle.
Lines 11-12: Triumph and Disasterthese personifications represent pretty much
opposing ends of the emotional spectrum. You're either a winner or a loser. All the same,
the advice here is not to let either experience influence your mindset. Lines 25-26: To be
a man, or to be a leader, the listener must be able to hang out with kings and commoners
and neither loses the common touch, nor his virtue. The kings and crowds
here symbolize the two extremes of the social spectrum.
Line 27: This alliterative line follows a similar pattern as lines 25-26. The speaker's
listener (his son) must not allow his foes or his "loving friends" (both F words) to hurt
him.
INTERPRETATION
"If": a simple, two-letter title, and one that does and does not tell us a whole lot
about the poem. When we come across this simple little title, our immediate reaction is
naturally, "If what?" This is because "if" is one of those words that really need a friend,
some other words to go with it. If you just walk into a room and go "if," people might

look at you like you're from Mars (or Jupiter, or even Pluto). Right off the bat, then, the
poem's title puzzles us. It is enigmatic, to say the least.
Here's the other thing about the word "if." It usually describes something that isn't
real, or isn't real yet. It points to something could potentially happen, or potentially exist.
Think of it like this: if somebody says to you "if you go to the store, you can buy soda,"
they are saying "hey, you haven't gone to the store, and you might not go to the store, but
if you do go, then you can get some soda." So, the word "if" usually describes something
that doesn't yet exist but also implies that some other things will happen: you will be able
to get soda once you're there.
This is the basic idea of Kipling's poem. It is 32 lines of things that the speaker's
listener hasn't done yet. If he does them, but only if, then he will basically have
possession of the entire world (a metaphor for power, a fulfilling life, and other things).
What's more, the listener will be a man. In short, the title tells us that "If" is a poem about
how certain things must be done. Only if those things are done, will certain other things
happen.
And here's one more little thing to consider: We never find out what will happen if
the speaker's addressee does everything he's supposed to, unless we read to the end of the
poem. In other words, only if we read all 32 lines do we learn what will happen if the
listener does everything he's supposed to do. Like the poem's addressee, we too have to
do our part if we want answers.

The virtues expressed in "If-" are devoid of showiness or glamour; it is notable

that Kipling says nothing of heroic deeds or great wealth or fame. For him the true
measure of a man is his humility and his stoicism.