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.

What do you think? If - by Rudyard Kipling The poem has at various times been called 'jingoistic nonsense' and, on the other hand,'unforgettable' (in a good way). Orwell is said to have called it a 'good bad' poem. T S Eliot apparently said at one stage that the poem was not a great poem, describing it instead as 'great verse'. Weirdly, the British press portrayed Jameson as a hero in the middle of the disaster and the actual defeat as a British victory. The British were defeated and this increased the tensions that ended up leading to the Second Boer War. This was the fellow who, in 1895, led a raid by British forces against the Boers in South Africa. Kipling said in his autobiography that the poem was inspired by Dr Leander Starr Jameson.

If kipling meaning