Reflections
IF - Rudyard Kipling
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!
Reflections
You ask me why - Lord Alfred Tennyson
V
And when the zoning eve has died
Where you dark valleys wind forlorn,
Come Hope and memory, spouse and bride
From out the borders of the morn,
With that fair child betwixt them born.
VI
And when no mortal motion jars
The blackness round the tombing sod
Thro’ silence and the trembling stars
Comes Faith from tracts no feet have trod,
And Virtue. Like a household god
VII
Promising empire; such as those
Once heard at dead of night to greet
Troy’s wandering prince, so that he rose
With sacrifice, while all the fleet
Had rest by stony hills of Crete.
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You ask me, why, tho’ill at ease,
Within this region I subsist,
Whose spirits falter in the midst,
And languish for the purple seas.
It is the land that freemen till,
That sober-suited Freedom chose,
The land, where girt with friends or foes
A man may speak the thing he will;
A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From precendent to precedent
Where faction seldom gathers head,
But by degrees to fullness wrought,
The strength of some diffusive thought
Hath time and space to work and spread.
