Victorian Motivational Poetry for Boys and Men

A scene from "Invictus," starring Matt Damon. Warner Bros.

Homer’s Achilles. Virgil’s Aeneas. The poems the heroes Beowulf and El Cid  by anonymous composers. Edmund Spenser’s Red Cross Knight. Despite being separated by time and culture, for nearly three millennia bards known and unknown have created heroes who were courageous, stoic in the face of pain, forthright in their dealings with others, respectful toward women, and protective of the poor and the helpless.

For their audiences, these epics and other poems and songs established a code of conduct and standards of behavior that separated real men from those who were all wax and no wick. For the young, these stories in verse, regardless of length, were frequently primers of manhood.

A scene from "Captains Courageous." Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

In the Victorian era and the early years of the 20th century, many writers continued to feature this ancient code of manhood in their work. For adolescent males, novels like “Tom Brown’s School Days” by Thomas Hughes, Rudyard Kipling’s “Captains Courageous,” and Horatio Alger’s “Ragged Dick,” and essays like Theodore Roosevelt’s “The American Boy,” acted as modern manuals for manhood.

And in this company of writers affirming traditional masculine virtues were the poets.

The Classic

Of all the motivational poems written for young men during this period, Rudyard Kipling’s “If” surely remains by far the best known. Published in 1910, the poem became wildly popular and remains a favorite even today. It begins with a series of directives to the young—“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs”—and ends with a prediction:

If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a man, my son!

On YouTube are several magnificent readings of “If,” including one by actor Michael Caine. His version alone has more than 6 million hits, with more than 5,000 comments. Here we find men and many women, young and old, speaking of how Kipling’s lines have moved them, how they heard the poem from a grandparent or saw it posted on the wall of their mother’s kitchen, how they memorized it in school. The comments and stories told by visitors on this and other sites make for a stirring tribute both to the poem and to the ideals it espouses.

Cover of "If" by Rudyard Kipling. Public Domain

A Runner-Up

Another motivational Victorian verse still popular today is William Ernest Henley’s 1875 stiff upper lip of a poem, “Invictus.” As a boy, Henley was infected with tuberculosis of the bone, which resulted in the amputation of his left leg below the knee before he was 20. Despite this infirmity, he practiced the triumphant stoicism that he salutes in “Invictus”:

In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.

A movie about a South African rugby team bore both the name of Henley’s poem and its theme, and Invictus is popular today as a motto among the tattoo crowd.

Achilles, Beowulf, and Galahad would have applauded Henley’s advocacy of manly fortitude.

Boys playing cricket, which like many sports helps prepare boys especially for their future manhood. Lia/Shutterstock

Sports and Manhood

During this same time, organized sports in both the British Isles and America were coming into their own, and were considered an excellent training ground for boys transitioning to manhood.

In his 1892 poem “Vitai Lampada,” a title taken from the Latin poet Lucretius and meaning “the torch of life,” Henry Newbolt begins with an account of a schoolboy engaged in a game of cricket. The team’s captain claps the lad on the shoulder and urges him to “Play up! Play up! And play the game!”

In the second verse, Newbolt abruptly shifts to a battlefield:

The river of death has brimmed his banks, And England’s far, and Honour a name, But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks: ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’

The third and final stanza tells us that this lesson—to play up and play the game—is one which the graduates of this school must carry throughout life.

Across the Pond

Meanwhile, poets in the United States and Canada were also composing verse aimed at equipping young males’ traditionally held beliefs of manhood. These writers may have emphasized some points more than their British counterparts did, such as the pioneer spirit of independence and self-reliance, but otherwise they adhered to the same set of masculine virtues and behaviors.

In his 1894 poem “The Coming American,” which also goes by the title “Bring Me Men to Match My Mountains,” Sam Walter Foss issues a call for just such men, stalwart souls who might build a country:

Bring me men to match my mountains, Bring me men to match my plains, Men with empires in their purpose, And new eras in their brains.

Some other poets explained what virtues might help make such men.

Young men are eager for guidance in our modern society. Kiselev Andrey Valerevich/Shutterstock

Will It, Think It, Persevere

Though almost unknown today, Berton Braley wrote thousands of poems and hundreds of stories, and was widely read in his day. Like so many motivational books and podcasts today, Braley’s “The Will to Win,” tells readers that stern resolution is a necessary tool if they are for success.

If neither cold poverty, famished and gaunt, Nor sickness nor pain Of body or brain Can turn you away from the thing that you want, If dogged and grim you besiege and beset it, You'll get it!

This same age touted the power of the mind in shaping ourselves and our destiny, as may be seen in James Allen’s 1902 classic self-help guide, “As a Man Thinketh,” which remains in print today. In Walter Wintle’s poem “Thinking,” sometimes called “The Man Who Thinks He Can” or “State of Mind,” he offers a condensed version of this idea. Positive thoughts, he tells us, lead to victory, negative ones to defeat. He begins with this snappy stanza:

If you think you are beaten, you are If you think you dare not, you don’t, If you’d like to win, but you think you can’t, It is almost a cinch you won’t.

Wintle ends by reassuring readers that “soon or late the man who wins/ is the one who thinks he can!”

Born and raised in Canada, and moving later to the United States, Edmund Vance Cooke gained fame as a poet and a writer of books for children. His 1903 poem “How Did You Die?” urges perseverance when “a trouble’s a ton, or a trouble’s an ounce:”

The harder you’re thrown, why the higher you bounce; Be proud of your blackened eye! It isn’t the fact that you’re licked that counts, It’s how did you fight—and why?

The poem concludes with this bold stanza:

And though you be done to the death, what then? If you battled the best you could, If you played your part in the world of men, Why, the Critic will call it good. Death comes with a crawl, or comes with a pounce, And whether he’s slow or spry, It isn’t the fact that you’re dead that counts, But only how did you die?

They Still Speak to Us

Endurance athlete David Goggins is also a motivational speaker and author. Rishi Kumar man/CC BY-SA 4.0

Some among us mock these old ideals of manhood, treating them as antiques, creaky and out of place in our present-day culture.

Yet millions of young people, particularly men, are starving for want of guidance, standards, and goals. We see this hunger in the large numbers of those of both sexes who visit sites like RedFrost Motivation, which features most of the poems we’ve looked at here. In their search for light, millions of our teens and 20-somethings also listen to podcasts and YouTube talks by speakers ranging in style from Jordan Peterson to David Goggins.

If we want to build men to match the mountains of life, we must equip our boys with the rope, crampons, and axes necessary for scaling those peaks. Adding these old poems and others to that kit will make the climb all the easier.

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