If – Rudyard Kipling to Music – Song Description
“If you can dream, and not make dreams your master.” These are Kipling’s own words, not mine, and I’ve never once claimed otherwise or tried to blur that line for my own benefit. I set them to music because I’ve loved that particular poem since I was a boy, long before I ever wrote a song of my own, and I simply wanted an honest excuse to sing it out loud the way I’d always heard it in my head. There’s a small, quiet argument against ego folded into the act of doing this at all — taking something that already existed, fully formed and better than anything I could have written myself on the subject, and carrying it forward exactly as it was given to me, without quietly attaching my own name to any part of it as though I’d contributed more than a melody. Some things, I think, are worth passing along unchanged rather than reworking simply to make them more obviously your own. This felt like one of them, and I didn’t want to disturb it.
(Verse 1)
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.
(Verse 2)
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.
(Chorus)
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.
(Verse 3)
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.
(Bridge)
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.
(Verse 4)
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!’
(Final Chorus)
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;
(Outro)
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!
Lyrics – Michael Forty