BUCKET LIST UPDATE – No. 50: Memorize Rudyard Kipling’s poem, 'If'

I scratched another item off my bucket list during the past week when I took the time to memorize Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “If.”

Kipling wrote this poem in 1895, but it wasn’t published until 1910, when it appeared in a collection of Kipling’s short stories and poems called “Rewards and Fairies.” Often voted England’s most favorite poem, “If” was inspired by Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, who led an unsuccessful British raid against the Boers in South Africa in 1895. The raid led to the Second Boer War, and the British press turned Jameson into a national hero.

I was inspired to memorize this poem and added it to my bucket list in January after reading an article about it on my favorite Web site, The Art of Manliness (artofmanliness.com). In an article published in 2008, authors Brett and Kate McKay encouraged men to memorize “If” because the poem is “an amazingly insightful poem on the attributes of what makes a man a man.” In a 2009 article, they called “If” one “of the most manliest poems ever written” and “a poem that every man should have thoroughly lodged in his head, ready to conjure up whenever he’s feeling down.”

Kipling also happens to be one of the most famous freemasons in the history of “the world’s oldest fraternity,” and I must admit that I was also inspired to memorize “If” by my learned Masonic brother, Phil Freeman of Greening Lodge, No. 53 in Evergreen, Ala. Freeman has a sharp intellect, a first rate memory and is a great memorizer of poems and other material.

My approach to memorizing “If” was simple. My high school football coach, John Harper, often said that “Repetition is the key to learning,” so with that in mind, I read the poem over and over again with the goal of memorizing at least five new lines of the poem each day. “If” consists of four, eight-line stanzas, so I started Monday of last week and had the gist of the poem down by Friday. Over the course of Saturday and Sunday, I knocked the rough edges off and to ensure that I’d actually learned the poem, I practiced typing it into a blank Word document until I could type the entire poem without making a mistake. In all, I probably spent about two hours on this little project over the course of a week, that is, less than 20 minutes a day.

For those of you unfamiliar with this awesome poem, the complete text reads as follows:

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!

As mentioned earlier, this poem, even 100 years after its first publication, is still hugely popular in England, and it’s often recited by famous actors. To watch an entertaining rendition of the poem by the late actor Dennis Hopper, who recited the poem before a live audience on The Johnny Cash Show in 1970, click on the following YouTube link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlfnm9gV52w.

In the end, I enjoyed scratching another item off my bucket list. How many of you have ever heard of this poem? How many of you have ever had to memorize it, possibly for school? Have you memorized any other poems? If so, what are some of your favorites? Let us know in the comments section below.