If—: Motifs | SparkNotes

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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Extreme Opposites

Throughout “If—,” the speaker presents several hypothetical scenarios that require the careful navigation of extreme opposites. Such careful navigation is centrally important to the vision of stoicism the speaker conjures in the poem. Perhaps the most obvious example of extreme opposites comes at the top of the second stanza (lines 11–12):

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same.

Here, the speaker insists that “you” should be able to treat great success (“Triumph”) and great failure (“Disaster”) with equal indifference. The challenge, of course, lies in the fact that triumph and disaster are both so extreme; you would have to be an exemplary stoic not to react to either! Elsewhere in the poem, the speaker teases out other extreme opposites to define the path for a properly stoic man:

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much.

In these lines (lines 25–28), the speaker puts forward additional examples of extreme opposites: kings and commoners, friends and foes, and “all men” and “none.” For each case, the speaker’s point is that “you” should never be swayed one way or the other, but always walk the straight path between the extremes.

Negations

“If—” is a poem in which a father gives advice to his son about how to be a man. However, the poem is as much a guide about what not to do as it is an outline of what to do. Indeed, on close inspection, the reader will notice a significant number of negations throughout the poem. The speaker frequently uses the words “not,” “nor,” and “don’t” in his hypothetical scenarios. He also uses more extreme negations like “never,” “none,” and “nothing,” though those words appear less frequently. To see how negations typically appear in the poem, consider these lines from the opening stanza (lines 5–8):

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise.

Every line in this passage contains at least one negation, and the fourth line even contains two. In each case, the speaker uses negation to evoke an overall sense of balance. Being able to wait must thus be balanced by not getting tired by waiting. Likewise, just because lies and hatred might be directed toward you doesn’t mean you should stoop to telling falsehoods and hating others. The speaker uses negations in similar ways throughout the poem to teach his son a form of masculinity defined by balance and self-restraint.