Pondering “If”

Due to the Passover/Easter Holiday, I am sending out this week’s inspiration a day early.

To My Magnificent Agents, Staff and Friends:

While reading a mystery novel this this week, I came across a line from a poem that I grew up with. Seeing it spurred recollections of the beautiful prose and meaningful messages that one encounters when reading this eloquent couplet. That chance meeting compelled me to reacquaint myself with the author and the poem. After that encounter, I was also moved to share a bit of the treasure I rediscovered in that reunion with you.

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. He was born in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, and was taken by his family to England when he was five years old. He is regarded as a major “innovator in the art of the short story.” His children’s books are enduring classics of children’s literature and his best works are said to exhibit “a versatile and luminous narrative gift.”

Kipling’s inspirational poem If first appeared in his collection Rewards and Fairies in 1909. The poem If is inspirational, motivational, and offers its reader a set of rules for living abundantly. If contains mottos and maxims for life, and is also a blueprint for personal integrity, behavior and self-development. If is perhaps even more relevant today than when Kipling wrote it, as an ethos and a personal philosophy. Lines from Kipling’s If appear over the player’s entrance to Wimbledon’s Centre Court – a poignant reflection of the poem’s timeless and inspiring quality.

The beauty and elegance of If contrasts starkly with Rudyard Kipling’s largely tragic and unhappy life. He was starved of love and attention and sent away by his parents; beaten and abused by his foster mother; and a failure at a public school which sought to develop in him qualities that were completely alien to Kipling. In later life the deaths of two of his children also affected him deeply.

Kipling achieved fame quickly, based initially on his first stories and poems written in India, where he returned as a young man of 17. His great popularity with the British public continued throughout his life despite critical reaction to some of his more conservative works, and critical opinion in later years that his poetry was superficial and lacking in depth of meaning.

Kipling turned down many honors offered to him including a knighthood, Poet Laureate and the Order of Merit, but in 1907 he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature. Kipling’s wide popular appeal survives through other works, notably The Jungle Book (1894) the novel, Kim (1901), and Just So Stories (1902).

Have a glorious and AWE-full Passover/Easter Weekend!

Bill