Tower and Town, November 2023

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Thoughts Invoked By Literature

Year 13 student, Beth Bradbury-Birrell poetically reflects on what can be felt and learned in reading the poem ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling.

“If,” it begins...

The boy listens intently to the words as they take flight,
Soaring from the lips of his father which kiss him goodnight.
The words are his and their own, growing greater, taller.
They climb the walls and fill the darkened room,
      thrash against the distant hum of war
and follow him, the fresh-eyed little boy,
      into the frightening world beyond the door.
They bandage up the grazes on his knees,
      and stitch up scrapes and scraps that tear his clothes,
Sew up the tears in dust-caked khaki green that hangs around his ankles
      – but he’ll grow.
He’ll grow one day, for these words keep him patient,
      they meet with doubt a firm salute of trust.
And hold his wide-eyed head upon his shoulders,
      while others lose theirs, rolling through the dust.
They burst across the twilight sky like shrapnel,
      fill the frightening dark with jewels of light
For him to hang his eager boyhood dreams on,
      to comfort him throughout the looming night.
They lead his earnest mind to wonder why it is that they march on,
      with weapons raised,
And fight the rows on rows of other boys who march,
      and fall, and bleed red just the same.
They reach out from the centre of the Earth and hold him to her
      though there’s nothing left of him to hold,
      but heavy heart and eyes that long to shut, to let him find his rest.
So, they sing to him a lullaby. They let him rest and close his weary eyes -
But whisper in his ear that when dawn comes,
      they’ll wake him up to watch the red sun rise.
They carry him far from the night to refuge -
      his khakis now stop just short of his shins,
And finally, worlds from his war-torn homeland,
      he basks in peace and, once again, begins.
They sip the sunlight, slipping through the trees like molten gold,
      and bleed into the stream,
who cleans his wounds, and soothes his aching feet,
      and sweeps away the losses he has seen.
His is the Earth and everything within it,
      the peace he chased and conflicts yet to come,
for the words that held at bay the ruthless world sing from the sky:
      “You are a Man, my son.”

The words, unequivocally profound and equally simple, cannot belong solely to Kipling, nor to the boy or to his father – they are greater than him, greater than you or me, for they inevitably become greater. They are what it is to survive, to be human, words to live by. The boy is faceless, for he is anyone and everyone pursuing peace and liberation, humanity. ‘If’ is the song of freedom.

Beth Bradbury-Birrel (y13)