If you can hold your staff when all about you,
Are dropping theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can fight alone when all Rome fights you,
But make allowance for their fighting too;
If you can love and not be tired of loving,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or seeing Callisto, don’t give way to hating,
And yet always look your best, and talk so wise.

If you can dream – and not bow to Morpheus;
If you are known – and still make humble your aim;
If you can meet with Dahak and your fears,
And treat those imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear stories you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch Perdicus and your life, broken,
And stoop to build it up with worn out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk each penny to save Xena’s horse,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your legs and arms and sinew
To fight your turn long after they are gone,
So battle on when there is nothing in you
Except the will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with Meg and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Diana – nor lose the common touch,
If neither Ares nor Joxer can hurt you,
If all Greeks count with you – but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ of iambic pentameter
Yours is the Earth and everything in it,
And what’s more Gabrielle, there’ll be none better.

No poems by Rudyard Kipling were harmed during the making of this tribute