He Won the Nobel
Prize One hundred and twenty years ago in Lahore, today the second city in Pakistan but then an administrative center in British India, a 17-year-old subeditor fresh out of school in England worked very hard to get out each day's edition of the Civil and Military Gazette. Every now and then the young subeditor, with his editor's assent, would fill up a little left-over space in the newspaper with a poem of his own composition, much to the annoyance of the Indian typesetters, who did not like to use the special typefaces the poet deemed appropriate to distinguish his poems from the prose around them. In 1886 he gathered up all of these poems from the previous three years and republished them in a book, under the title Departmental Ditties. The book was an immediate hit with other British colonials, and the first printing sold out very quickly. Then it was one book after another, for from 1883 until his death in 1936 the poet's pen was seldom idle; hardly a week went by that he did not write one or more poems. Because his poetry expressed so well the common sentiment of the race, the deep soul-sense of men conscious of their breeding and of their responsibility to live up to a standard set by their forebears, it became very popular with his fellows. He was by far the most widely read, and the best-loved, poet writing in English at the beginning of this century; every cultured person in the English speaking world was familiar with at least some of his poems. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Below is an example of one of his classic poems. You read it in high school, but now read it carefully again: 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 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! ~ The above poem is "If" by the famed English author Rudyard Kipling. ~ |