![]() ![]() I still hadn’t really decided what I was doing in terms of in race fuelling, (not recommended), and so had worn a small waist pouch, which I’ve worn countless times before. I barely noticed these miles, as I was occupied in an internal dialogue about my waist belt. The first three miles of the race from the Blue pen heads out east, on residential roads, before converging with Red runners at about 5k. And, as far as I’m concerned, the second half of the third verse could be subtitled The London Marathon: It’s only recently that I’ve learnt that the lines “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same” are emblazoned above the entrance to Centre Court at Wimbledon. If comes into its own in the sporting field. Admittedly, a collective familiarity with the work has made a cliché of virtually every line, but in my opinion, If is a rare example of “life advice” verse, neither too ranty, nor too saccharine. ![]() I would feel like someone was laying into my favourite childhood toy as lecturers would almost sneer when ripping apart If. One of the modules of my English degree was on Imperialist literature, and it was not cool to like Kipling, at university, in 1997 he was the “Jingo imperialist” of George Orwell’s critical essay, some 70 odd years before. The poem is nursery rhyme-like, it deals with very basic themes, and it does it in such a way, with such a rhythm that it’s impossible to ignore, especially when your mother is reciting it loudly, holding aloft a wooden spoon. Rewards and Fairies, Kipling’s 1907 collection of short stories that the poem is taken from, is a children’s book. ![]() And it’s not really surprising, as it appeals to a juvenile ear, especially one like mine, brought up on musicals and hymns and Irish ballads and Motown. The da-dum, da-dum of the iambic pentameter, and Mum’s favourite themes of being true to oneself, of being no better nor no worse than anyone else, and of filling that elusive “unforgiving minute/ with sixty second’s worth of distance run”- I knew the poem by heart by the time I was eight years old. I’m sure Thomas Hood’s maudlin I Remember, I Remember has scarred me for life, but Alfred Noyes’s Highwayman and Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott , and the Gatling jammed, and the Colonel dead in Sir Henry Newbold’s Vitai Lampada were more thrilling than watching a film with Mum’s dramatic license in the telling.īut best of all was If. Mum would read the poems to us while we were in the bath, and at bedtime- Blake’s sweet Infant Joy, and impressive Tyger, John Masefield’s haunting Sea Fever, Milton’s On His Blindness, Wordsworth’s Daffodils, Keats’s To Autumn, de la Mare’s Listeners– the canon of our childhood. When I was born, my Aunty Margaret gave my mum a copy of The Golden Treasury, Francis Palgrave’s anthology of English poetry, inscribing “So that Katherine may enjoy the poems that we so loved as children” on the title page. ![]()
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