Every player walking onto Centre Court at Wimbledon passes under the same two lines, carved above the door: "If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same." They come from Rudyard Kipling's If—.
Britain's favourite poem
If— is a single thirty-two-line sentence of advice: keep your head, trust yourself but allow for doubt, risk everything and start again if you lose it, hold your nerve while everyone around you is losing theirs. Published in 1910, it has been voted Britain's favourite poem more than once, and printed on more posters and walls than almost any poem in English.
Written for a son
Kipling wrote it as counsel to his young son, John. The advice takes on a terrible weight in hindsight: John Kipling was killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915, aged eighteen — and his father, who had pulled strings to get him into the army despite his weak eyesight, spent years searching for the body. The poem about endurance was written by a man who would need every word of it.
The impostors
The line at Wimbledon is the poem's sharpest idea: triumph and disaster are both "impostors" — neither the win nor the loss is quite as real, or as permanent, as it feels in the moment. Good advice for a tennis final. Good advice for most things.
Coming to Palimpsest
"If—" is one of the most-printed poems in English and squarely in our wheelhouse. It's on the list. For now, browse the English Poetry line.