England's Answer

Stand to your work and be wise -- certain of sword and pen,
Who are neither children nor Gods, but men in a world of men!

These last two lines of Kipling’s “England’s Answer” adorned the stone above the stage in my high school auditorium. It was the only high school in town that was housed in an imposing 19th-century stone building, not a sleek new brick square in a treeless field, and the poem’s lines was carved in slim gold-filled letters with V’s for Us: bvt men in a world of men. The school was in a once-elegant part of downtown that had become skuzzier since my father was a student there, since the wealth bled out of the heart of our industrial city and into our swollen suburbs. I associated the lines uneasily with both the outer push of high school and the homeward pull of my father, even as I read my own (much more experimental) poetry at student talent shows beneath those words, in slightly more hippie-ish clothes each time. 

Stand to your work and be wise -- certain of sword and pen,
Who are neither children nor Gods, but men in a world of men!

The final lines are burned in my brain, heavy with formless meaning, so it’s funny that it was just the other day I read the preceding lines of the poem for the first time. They hit me much harder than the ones on the wall. Or maybe they’re just relevant to me, just now. 

Go to your work and be strong, halting not in your ways,
Balking the end half-won for an instant dole of praise.

…Balking the end half-won for an instant dole of praise.