"If--", "Boots", and "Bill 'Awkins" by Rudyard Kipling - poems and stories

"If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs..."

--If-- by Rudyard Kipling

I spent a lot of time pulling books off of my parents' bookshelf and thumbing through them. Two beloved books were Kipling: A Selection of His Stories and Poems, volumes 1 and 2, collected by John Beecroft. One of my mother's favorite poems was Kipling's If--, but I don't know how much of these books she had read.

In the 8th grade, I took Speech from Miss Hale, who later would become Mrs. Branson and an important part of my junior high experience. She was the leader of my Senior Girl Scout troop, and would encourage me to enter a beauty/talent contest. 

Whenever I had to do a reading in class Mom would recommend something for me. I've always wondered if the readings she recommended were the same she did in High School, and I am sure that when she told me to use the poem If-- for class it was because she had success with it 30 years earlier.

I loved reading the poems in this collection, and back then I had no clue about the impact that Britain had on the world through colonization and the resulting wars. I am only 1 generation removed from the family members who were born at the end of the Victorian Era and was born only 13 years after the end of World War II, where the U.S. fought side-by-side with English soldiers whose Empire still spanned the globe. It had been almost 200 years since we were a colony of that same Empire, but still the afterglow of colonial life in the subcontinent left misguided romantic ideas that my mother loved to read about. And I admit, reading Kipling's poetry was "easy"; it had humor, lots of fun poetic devices, and if you hadn't a clue about the racism involved, the stories were interesting.

The poems I read the most were 

• If-- (of course, I knew it by heart when I was younger)
• Fuzzy Wuzzy
• Danny Deever
• Boots (I once wrote a poem in the style of Boots about math tests)
• The Virginity
• Mother 'O Mine
• Bill 'Awkins

I didn't read many of the stories back then, but have since read some of the Jungle Book stories and some of the stand-alone stories. My favorite is Wee Willie Winkie, a story about a six-and-three-quarters-year-old boy who, while mischievous, is also loyal and brave to a fault.

I still have these two books, and I still like to pull them off the shelf.