If by Rudyard Kipling (‘Brother Square-Toes’-Rewards and Fairies)


                                                                                                                                                                        The saying:  Yours is the Earth and Everything that’s in it,  comes from the poem titled If by Rudyard Kipling 1865-1936 and is recited by Sir Michael Caine
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.

kipling
Rudyard Kipling 1865-1936
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. 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.
 I F
  • 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 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 that’s in it,
    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

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