If - Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

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:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

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:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

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;

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!

Danse Macabre - David Park Barnitz

I saw a line of corpses old,

Dead with diseases manifold,

Solemnly dancing'neath the moon.

Their perish'd limbs moved to the tune

Of some worm-orchestra unheard--

A sight enormously absurd.

First in the valse, with fishy eye

Tripped something dead of leprosy,

All silvery like a virgin's breast.

A buried glutton danced with zest,

All greenish and all dropsical,

Like a deform'd and vital ball.

The third was very beautiful,

Of charming small-pox sorelets full;

A small-pox ending, corpse, was thine.

There danced one in that naked line

Whose corpse was rotten with much love;

I wish the white worms joy thereof.

A suicidal corpse came next,

Who wish'd to illustrate the text:

--better to be chewed than to chew;

So he became a worm-ragout

And cholera-corpses weirdly black

Carrying their dead flesh like a sack,

Vals'd graceful beneath the sun.

Blue fever, and Consumption,

And hollow-pated lunacy.

Bowed, in that dance with courtesy

Cover'd with sores from foot to head,

Like flowers in a flower-bed,

Strange plagues all beautifully green

Went pirouetting through the scene;

And shrunken corpses dead of Age.--

These things went dancing o'er the stage.

Smelling of graves and worm-tooth scars,--

Death's musty-meated avatars."

From "The Book of Jade" by David Park Barnitz