Rudyard Kipling

Featured Photo: Pondering Woman | © Pixabay

Everyone knows his two jungle books from the years 1894 and 1895, and most of them have at least seen a film adaptation of them.

has me Rudyard Kipling particularly impressed by the fact that, among other things, he rejected elevation to the nobility, thereby making even the well-known Hanseatic rejection "look old".

But not because of his books, such as B. probably his best-known novel Kim 1901, or his already mentioned reticence, but because of the following poem from 1910, Kipling is still fondly remembered to this day.

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 song 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!

The poem was written around 1895, probably based on Leander Starr Jameson written.

The two lines of the poem "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / and treat those two impostors just the same" Incidentally, you can find them very prominently in the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in London, as well as in the West Side Tennis Club in New York.

Some feel that the poem quite well conveys the idea of The Bhagavad Gita, one of the central scriptures of Hinduism. I mean that's pretty good too Rudyard Kiplings own life would fit.

But I don't want to leave it unmentioned that Albert Schweitzer (The world view of the Indian thinkers 1935) sees the Bhagavad Gita very critically, namely as "the most idealized book in world literature."