And You Will Be A Woman, My Daughter

[bobby1933]

IIf, by Rudyard Kipling

Comments

[skuld_walkure]

growing up is never easy on the soul.

[bobby1933]

I think there is much about Kipling that i would not have liked, him being the "poet of empire" and all. There are even a few lines in "If" that i might have preferred to erase. But i love this poem; it describes the person that i would like to become. In spite of his notion that "never the twain shall meet," the poem seems to me more Asian than European, and has, for me, a mystical quality to it. Though there is much ego in the poem, that fades away as i read it aloud. At 80, i am still not grown up in all the ways that being "grown up" is good.