If

Queen Shenaynay

For shame.

As we enjoy a Sunday evening chat around the hearth, the shocking truth comes out: certain Beehive citizens are not familiar with the stirring poem If by Rudyard Kipling. The Queen was required to memorize it at the age of nine, which is not all that remarkable, until one knows the rest of the story, a tale which should be told. But first, our Gentle Readers should have the pleasure of the poem:

If

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 imposters 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!

Rudyard Kipling


Now, the story. Nine years passed between my fourth grade memorization of this poem, and the summer of my seventeenth year, when I had all four of my wisdom teeth removed in one nasty afternoon. I doubt I gave the poem a single thought in all that time.

The dentist used full anesthesia. In the recovery room, in those first woozy moments of coming up from the druggy fog, my mother said I began to quote poetry. Still strapped to the gurney, I gave a rather thick performance of "I never saw a moor" by Emily Dickenson -- not surprising, since I had recently memorized it (and love it still). Then, I quoted "If" in its entirety.

The next day, Mother asked me, "When did you memorize that Kipling poem?"

Through swollen chipmunk cheeks I lisped, "Don't fink I have any Kip-wing memo-wized."

"If, I think it was."

"Oh, dat. Fourf gwade. Why?"

Mother gaped. When she told me what I'd done the day before, I'm sure I would have gaped, too -- had I been able to open my sore, sutured jaw. Fully conscious, I could recall bits and snippets of it, but I couldn't begin to recite the whole shebang.

Just goes to show that whatever one puts in one's little pea-pickin' brains DOES in fact get stashed away in there for good. Just because one cannot retrieve it doesn't mean it isn't there. One just needs to find the weedy path to it. And sometimes that's like pulling teeth.

Exactly like. ;-)