It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person.
—George Orwell, 1942

My childhood home did not boast many literary accoutrements. Apart from an imposing set of “World’s Classics,” what I chiefly remember is a framed copy of (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If—.” It was printed with impressive gilt filigree on a sheet of foolscap and, together with a portrait of my Guardian Angel, it presided in quiet admonition on my bedroom wall.

I never memorized the poem, though I internalized its cadence while nervously savoring the impossible combination of virtues it pleaded:

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,

Etc. Tough for an impatient eight- or ten- (or fifty-) year-old. There were thirteen such conditionals to be fulfilled before arriving at the consummating apodosis: “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,/ And—which is more—you’ll be a Man my son!”

“All well and good,” I remember musing, “but what ‘if not’?”

“If—” is probably Kipling’s most famous poem. As recently as 1995, a BBCpoll named it Britain’s favorite. Written in 1895, when Kipling was thirty and crossing the threshold