Field Report
Filed under Kipling, written around 1895, held back thirteen years before publication in Rewards and Fairies. Cross-referenced: Triumph, Disaster, Will. Voted Britain's favourite poem in a 1996 BBC poll, by a margin nobody else in the poll came close to.
Below: the source text as Kipling left it, the lyric as it now exists on tape, and our notes on the one thing this adaptation refuses to do that every other file in this archive does.
The Source
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!
The Resurrection
Verse 1
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:
Chorus
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;
Verse 2
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:
Verse 3
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!’
Chorus
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;
Verse 4
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!
Chorus
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;
Outro
(Treat them the same)
(Oh, just the same)
Notes from the Archivists
Every other file in this archive gets reordered. Hope gets its first stanza promoted to chorus. A Dream Within a Dream isolates its refrain and repeats it out of proportion. Even the strictest adaptations in this collection rearrange something. “If—” doesn't. Verse one is stanza one, verse two is the back half of stanza two, verse three is stanza three, verse four is stanza four, in Kipling's own order, start to finish, with only a recurring quatrain lifted out as the chorus.
That restraint isn't an oversight. “If—” is a single sentence — thirty-two lines of conditional clauses, every stanza opening on “If,” building toward one then that doesn't arrive until the final couplet: “Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, / And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!” Move any of those conditions out of sequence and the sentence stops parsing. You can extract a chorus from it — the “Triumph and Disaster” quatrain works as a hook on its own — but you cannot reorder the rest without breaking the grammar the whole poem depends on. So the song doesn't. It's the one adaptation in this archive that treats the source's structure as load-bearing rather than optional.
It's also worth noticing what the poem withholds and the song keeps withholding: the word “son.” For thirty-one lines, the poem addresses an unnamed “you.” Only in the very last word does the reader learn this was a father speaking to a child the whole time. The lyric doesn't editorialize around that reveal or soften the wait for it — it just lets the last line land exactly where Kipling put it, after four full stanzas of a reader assuming the address was general. The ad-libbed outro — (Treat them the same), (Oh, just the same) — loops back to the second stanza instead, leaving the actual ending, the reveal, undisturbed and unrepeated.
Filed here as the control specimen: proof that the chorus-and-repetition device used everywhere else in this collection is a choice, applied when a poem's own structure invites it and withheld when it doesn't.
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