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 famous quote from Kipling’s poem “If-” above the doors that lead to Wimbledon’s Centre Court, Londonįor these next two weeks, the best tennis players in the world will enter Wimbledon’s fabled Center Court under two lines of poetry inscribed in capital letters above the tunnel that leads from the locker room: 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. What do you think? If - by Rudyard Kipling The poem has at various times been called 'jingoistic nonsense' and, on the other hand,'unforgettable' (in a good way). Orwell is said to have called it a 'good bad' poem. T S Eliot apparently said at one stage that the poem was not a great poem, describing it instead as 'great verse'. Weirdly, the British press portrayed Jameson as a hero in the middle of the disaster and the actual defeat as a British victory. The British were defeated and this increased the tensions that ended up leading to the Second Boer War. This was the fellow who, in 1895, led a raid by British forces against the Boers in South Africa. Kipling said in his autobiography that the poem was inspired by Dr Leander Starr Jameson.

You will be a man my son