The Gods of the Copybook Headings

I was conflicted when I first read this, because it's beautiful and speaks to the actual tenets of ideal conservative thought: preserving and making accessible the hard-learned lessons of the past.

But like real conservative thought, it conflates these with the fear of good things that are new, such as promoting equality and collective action.

The strongest rebuttal to this poem is acknowledging that comparing our wisdom and foolishness with foreign wisdom and foolishness can inform us of what is truly fundamental.

I memorized both this poem and William Knox's "O why should the spirit of mortal be proud?"^1 as an exercise in rote memorization. It took me a couple of days, but it's now been years and they're still burned in there.

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1 - https://hymnary.org/text/o_why_should_the_spirit_of_mortal_b...

Grug had a riff on it for programming:

https://twitter.com/GrugBrainedDev/status/159074853815336960...

That's funny, I was thinking about that poem just this morning.

One of those ones that sticks with you, and rings true for so many domains, whether you want it to or not!

Presumably openly telling coal miners that they need to work harder, when you're a well connected writer was enough to get you cancelled even in those days, hence the need to be so oblique about it.

Very interested to hear the HN crowd's reaction to this one. I like to annoy English grads by telling them that If... [1] is the greatest poem of the 20th century.

[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---