I'm glad I became a bookworm - Part II

Recently, I came across this poem in which I told myself a long time ago, that if I ever have any children in the future, I will read and enforce the values and meanings of it to them. For so many years, I had forgotten about it until I rediscovered it once again in another form of medium.

Many years back when I was in primary school, my house was swarmed from years of subscribing to Readers' Digest. Even after my dad stopped the subscription and no one seemed to read them anymore, I was set on keeping all four-years' worth of them.

Maybe it was because I felt that it would be such waste to throw them away just like that. Maybe they had seemed so easy to read for a small girl who just learned to love to read. Whichever it was, I practically plowed through them all and came across this article about Rudyard Kipling.

It would seem like a short profile on this brilliant British writer now, as compared to my perception of it from reading it then. The journalist who wrote this piece talked about Kipling's works and focused on the death of his son, John Kipling, who died before him in the war. He or she (I can't remember) managed to depict John as a boy who was the pride and joy of his father to the brave young man he turned out to be in such a moving way that I was tearing by the time I finished the article.

However, the one climatic part which caused me to break down completely is this poem by Kipling, inserted at the back of the article. Even though he wrote it before John's death, the timeliness of reading it after completing the story brought another tidal wave-like of emotions swept inside me.

If

by 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 imposters 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 wornout 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 breath 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!


In a funny twist of thoughts now, I feel that I myself as an adult now, should look up to this instead of what I had thought when I was a child. Yes, it may seem tacky or outdated for one to do that.

But, in this world where many of the good of the past are forgotten and we are so engrossed and disillusioned with what we see on the surface now, this is one of the timeless 'good' that we can always remember and savor, along with your very own classics.

Hope you know or realize them by now, be it the taste of the rice your deceased grandmother used to cook for you; or the look of your loved one's face when he/she smiles at you.