If you can keep your head...

HORRIFIED, drawn, weakened and shattered. Clinging on to power by her fingertips. Gasping and grasping and very much on borrowed time. Theresa May, Prime Minister of the UK, resembles a trout on the riverbank. Brexititus finally seems to have choked the life out of her. Panting like a puppy. She’s a goner. Or is there one more twist or turn of defiance in the oul dog yet? Like the last kick of a dying ass struggling in her political world of despondency?

Where once she was Queen of all she surveyed, with steady hand at the wheel, now the poor cratur is in a hole, with a shovel. Rattled to the core. Where, as is surely necessary, might she seek inspiration or solace? Do words of such required magnitude even exist? And if they do, who possibly could have uttered them? Step forward one literary giant of the old Empire!

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), remains one of modern times’ more recognisable and respected writers, considered by many a genius, a moral compass and an inspirational figure with the might of the pen. In 1907, at the age of 42, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize and its youngest recipient to date. Works such as ‘The Jungle Book’, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ and ‘Kim’ remain timeless. Plus, he was an excellent poet.

His poem ‘If’ has most likely been quoted and read to us, inspired and encouraged us, and resounded and existed within us far more than any of us may realise. It is delivered at births, deaths, marriages and mishaps with equal measure. Alongside life’s non-stop cycles of peaks and troughs that shadow each and every one of our lives, it remains relevant.

And if life itself is but a series of highs and lows, bitters and sweets, well, Kipling’s was no exception. Born in India during the time of The Raj, to well-off loving parents, his early life was one of wonder, adventure and splendour. A sharp twist in his road found him transported to England at the age of six for his education, and left under the wing of a cruel, abusive foster mother for the next five years. There followed an upward curve when he was moved to a school in Devon where he thrived. His path toward writing became clear and his first successes followed, only for disaster to strike when he was left penniless by a collapsing bank. He rose again following a move to the USA, but was forced to return to England after a lengthy, costly court battle.

On a return trip to the USA in 1899, his greatest catastrophe of all struck when his seven-year-old daughter Josephine died of pneumonia, leaving him utterly devastated. Although hardly a consolation, his reputation continued to climb culminating in the Nobel Prize in 1907. However, a further cruel twist of fate lay in store. When his son John failed the medical to enlist for World War One, Kipling pulled a few strings on his son’s behalf.

Alas, his son did not return from the Front, dying in the Battle of Loos in 1915. Guilt and despair swamped Kipling. But he coped with his grief and the harsh hands he had been dealt, and let us hope he took some measure of comfort from his own words contained within ‘If’, written for his son, some years earlier, in 1910. Because the words of this poem in its entirety are seismic, and will remain with us for all time. Small wonder they crop up again and again and again. Here is the fourth and final stanza;

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!

Joseph Rudyard Kipling died following surgery on January 18, 1936. His ashes were interred at Poets Corner, Westminster Abbey, London.

John J Kelly is a multiple award-winning poet from Enniscorthy. He is the co-founder of the Anthony Cronin Poetry Award with the Wexford Literary Festival and co-ordinator of poetry workshops for schools locally.

Each week, John’s column will deal mainly with novels, plays and poems from both the Leaving Certificate syllabus and Junior Certificate syllabus. kellyjj02@gmail.com