"If" Kipling poetry HELP!!!?

Question

what does the poem mean on a deeper level? please help me this is hard crazy!

Answer 1

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Answer 2

I've always thought that it was a very long-winded way of saying, "Moderation in all things".

Don't you think it's all about maintaining balance and equilibrium, both internally and in the world around you?

Answer 3

If" is a poem written in 1895 by Rudyard Kipling and first published in the Brother Square Toes chapter of Rewards and Fairies, Kipling's 1910 collection of short stories and poems.

According to Kipling in his autobiography "Something of Myself, "

posthumously published in 1937,

the poem was inspired by Dr Leander Starr Jameson, who in 1895 led a raid by British forces against the Boers in South Africa, subsequently called the Jameson Raid.[1]

This defeat increased the tensions that ultimately led to the Second Boer War. The British press, however, portrayed Jameson as a hero in the middle of the disaster, and the actual defeat as a British victory.

So as far as I can see, this poem looks at the failure of the Brits in Jameson's raid and laments the hugely different way things could have worked out for them had the raid been a success.