Rudyard Kipling was emo, and other thoughts from life’s middle passage
What do you do when you lose your way in life's middle valley? Recite "If—" by Rudyard Kipling, listen to emo, and dig in the dirt—that's what.
I’m recently unemployed. Our family is nearing the one-year mark of when we took in two foster kids. And here I am, taking courage from “If—” by Rudyard Kipling, “Sowing Season (Yeah)” by Brand New, and a John Mark Comer teaching. What is going on?
Look, this is going to get very Midlife Crisis Dad very, very quickly. I will be—as the kids today are saying—giving large amounts of Dad Energy. So, if you a) aren’t a middle-aged dad, b) weren’t a middle-aged dad, c) don’t want to be a middle-aged dad, or d) don’t know someone who is a middle-aged dad, then, well, I’m just saying: you’ve been warned.
Okay, here we go, into a dark valley, thick with unemployment and decades-old emo songs. Yikes. But first: some poetry.
Our two older kids memorized Rudyard Kipling’s beloved poem “If—” as part of their coursework at our Christian classical co-op this year. At the co-op’s end-of-school-year celebration, they stood with the rest of their class and recited it from memory. You likely encountered this poem when you were in elementary school, like me. I don’t remember ever memorizing it, though. Which is why I was a bit surprised to find myself quietly reciting from my seat in the audience these lines from the second stanza:
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
Somehow, I knew these lines but from some other other context. As my mind dug for the source, I realized that I knew them as song lyrics. Yes, they were lyrics—but to what song? Ah, of course: an emo song. And not just any emo song. The second half of the second stanza of Kipling’s “If—” (I love the em dash) appears almost word-for-word in the song “Sowing Season (Yeah)” by Brand New (yes, the name of the band is Brand New), the opening track and lead single from their third studio album, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me, released in 2006 when I was a junior in college.
And so, as a 40-year-old father, watching my fourth- and fifth-grade kids recite Kipling’s poem, I marveled at the fact that I had been listening to “Sowing Season (Yeah)” for almost 20 years without realizing that I had also been, in part, listening to Rudyard Kipling. How’s that for the value of classical education? How’s that for the staying power of emo? I bet Kipling never envisioned his work would rock as hard as this:
I don’t want to make this one of those click-baity, nostalgic bits of music criticism. But I do want to say a couple things about this song.
First, the lyrics in question. The Kipling lines. I want to make sure you understand how perfectly emo they are. “If—” (em dash FTW) was written around 1895, which is roughly 111 years before “Sowing Season (Yeah)” was released. Here’s how Jesse Lacy, lead singer for Brand New, transposed these lines for 20-something men trying to make something of the 21st century before they knew the full weight and significance of these words:
Is it in you now
To watch the things you gave your life to broken
And stoop and build them up with warn-out tools?
It’s the “Is it in you now” that gets me, that tweaks Kipling’s sentiment ever so slightly in a very emo way. Because as a single 20-something college student—or as a 40-year-old husband and father of three—I may not have it in me. But guess what? That’s okay.
Because—and here’s my second point—there’s good news in the twinkly, hopeful guitars that usher in the opening lines of the second verse:
Nothing gets so bad
A whisper from your father couldn’t fix it.
Your whisper’s like a bridge, he’s a river span.
Thinking of God the Father as a “river span” warrants bright and twinkly guitar chords. The father dynamic also brings in and reflects the fatherly warmth of “If—,” which is a wisdom-poem written from father to son. In some weird way, Jesse Lacy was fathering a subset of Millennials, even though we may not have realized it.
And yet, for me at least, the verb that both the poem and the song revolve around, the gravitational force that holds everything together, is “stoop.” To stoop means to get low, to come down to the reality of things, to get your hands dirty. It requires a steeled meekness, equal amounts humility and fortitude. Two virtues needed for sowing seeds and maturing to manhood.
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about what it means to stoop. I have been having to practice stooping. Taking up the tools at my disposal—however worn-out—for some repair work, for some re-giving of my life to.
In particular, the stooping has centered on two things: my work / job / vocation, and life in general as our family nears the one-year anniversary of when the two foster children were placed with us.
Music appreciation
I’ll spare you the curated playlist featuring the essential and authoritative Brand New cuts. You’re welcome. (For all you emo kids reading this, though, hit me up with your top 10 Brand New songs.)
One very not-emo jam our fam has been digging of late is this arrangement of the “Phos Hilaron" (O Gladsome Light). We usually cue it up every so often as we’re getting ready to sit down for our evening meal. When we do listen to it, we’ve found it helpful to prepare our hearts to give thanks for the day that was as we gather around the table.
Good reads (and more music recs?!?!)
Fiction: We recently started listening to the audio version of The Book of the Dun Cow (narrated by Paul Michael, who is superb), and holy cow, is this beast-fable fairy tale a real treat. Think Watership Down meets Lord of the Rings.
Non-fiction: Speaking of LOTR, I am midway through C.R. Wiley’s In the House of Tom Bombadil, a profound little book about one of the most intriguing characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth legendarium.
And holy cow Old Man Willow, did you know that Nickel Creek (yes, that Nickel Creek) has a song called “In the House Of Tom Bombadil”?!?!? I did not know this until literally five seconds ago. Which I am ashamed to say, because my wife owns the CD that this song appears on! It’s in her CD case in our entertainment hutch! What a world!
Okay, that’s enough serendipity for one newsletter. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go play this song on repeat on the CD player for, like, an hour straight.
‘Til next time, y’all.