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 | ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
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| Rudyard Kipling |
Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, to a British family. When he was five years old, he was taken to England to begin his education,... More > |
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Carpe Diem |
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A Shropshire Lad, II by A. E. Housman |
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As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII [All the world's a stage] by William Shakespeare |
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Three Airs for the Beggar’s Opera, Air XXII by John Gay |
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Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene III [O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?] by William Shakespeare |
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A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow |
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A Song On the End of the World by Czeslaw Milosz |
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Another Song [Are they shadows that we see?] by Samuel Daniel |
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Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke |
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Barter by Sara Teasdale |
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Be Drunk by Charles Baudelaire |
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Carpe Diem by Robert Frost |
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Carpe Diem: Poems for Making the Most of Time |
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Daphnis and Chloe by Haniel Long |
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Dreams by Langston Hughes |
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First Fig by Edna St. Vincent Millay |
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I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl (443) by Emily Dickinson |
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Ithaka by C. P. Cavafy |
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Live Blindly and Upon the Hour by Trumbull Stickney |
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My life closed twice before its close (96) by Emily Dickinson |
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Nothing Twice by Wislawa Szymborska |
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O Me! O Life! by Walt Whitman |
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O, Gather Me the Rose by William Ernest Henley |
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Song to Celia by Ben Jonson |
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The City by C. P. Cavafy |
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The Layers by Stanley Kunitz |
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The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost |
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To be alive by Gregory Orr |
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To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell |
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To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time by Robert Herrick |
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Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam by Ernest Dowson |
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We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths by Philip James Bailey |
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When I consider every thing that grows (Sonnet 15) by William Shakespeare |
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You Can't Have It All by Barbara Ras |
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Poems For Graduation |
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As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII [All the world's a stage] by William Shakespeare |
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Dreams by Langston Hughes |
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First Gestures by Julia Spicher Kasdorf |
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Ithaka by C. P. Cavafy |
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My Heart Leaps Up by William Wordsworth |
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The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost |
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The Writer by Richard Wilbur |
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| If—
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by Rudyard Kipling |
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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 wornout 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!
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About "If—"
In a 1995 BBC opinion poll, "If—" was voted the United Kingdom's favorite poem. During his lifetime, even Kipling started to resent the poem's popularity, saying it had been "anthologised to weariness." |
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