In this poem, the narrator is giving his son advice about living a good and worthwhile life and the manly virtues it takes to do this. He ends with:
If you can fill the unforgiving minuteWith sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,Yours is the Earth and everything that’s...
See This Answer Now
Start your 48-hour free trial to unlock this answer and thousands more. Enjoy eNotes ad-free and cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
In this poem, the narrator is giving his son advice about living a good and worthwhile life and the manly virtues it takes to do this. He ends with:
If you can fill the unforgiving minuteWith 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!
What he means by the "unforgiving minute" is time or life itself. If you can put the same unrelenting energy into it that you would put into a sixty second run, you can have "the earth." In other words, he is saying it is important to live your life fully and not hold back.
Throughout the poem, the speaker is offering advice about how to live well as a British gentlemen. Other attributes include not caring too much about money, trusting oneself when others don't, behaving with dignity to both kings and commoners, and shaking off defeats as if they didn't matter.
The stanza goes as follows:
If you can fill the unforgiving minuteWith 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!
As you know, these are the last four lines of the poem. The "unforgiving minute" is metonymy, or the substitution of a name for an attribute, when referring to time.
Minutes are "unforgiving" because, if we waste them, we can never get them back. A minute that is lost is lost forever. Therefore, the paternal narrator encourages his son to make good use of that minute. Because the poem triumphs what would have been masculine virtues in the nineteenth century, he encourages his son to use that minute on a physical pursuit: "sixty seconds' worth of distance run."
If his son can manage his time wisely, in addition to following the other advice in the poem, Kipling believes his son will have all that he desires in life ("yours is the Earth and everything that's in it").