Summary of if poem by Rudyard Kipling
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If others, who cannot take that responsibility for themselves react negatively, you will be... The poem is a father defining for his son the qualities of a good man.. He is setting the parameters or boundaries for his son and giving him a goal to achieve. The poem deals with life's challenges and how to deal with them.
he poem ‘If’ by the India-born British Nobel laureate poet Rudyard Kipling is a poem of ultimate inspiration that tells us how to deal with different situations in life. The poet conveys his ideas about how to win this life, and after all, how to be a good human being.
The poem, written in 1895 and first published in ‘Rewards and Fairies’, 1910 is 32 lines long with four stanzas of eight lines each. It is a tribute to Leander Starr Jameson. The poem is written in the form of paternal advice to the poet’s son, John. You may read more about the poem at Wikipedia.
For the theme, as already told, the poem basically tells us the conditions that we should meet to succeed in life and make this life happy and a beautiful one. The whole poem is written in a single complex sentence. So all the subordinate clauses begin with ‘if’ and the main clause concluding the entire theme comes at the end, and the poem ends with a full stop.
This structure of the poem was important to achieve the conditional goal. The poet speaks of the achievement at the end, after discussing all the requirements to reach there. This structure is actually symbolic in suggesting that you can get the rewards only after you have fulfilled the preconditions. Moreover, this makes the readers eager to know what would happen when we meet all these conditions, thus retaining the curiosity and interest till the end.
And, as the main theme of the poem is a combination of so many if’s, the title ‘If’ is an apt one for the poem.