TWO lines from what is regularly voted Britain’s best-loved poem have had their annual moment in the spotlight yet again.

A Wimbledon camera once more homed in on the splendid words from Rudyard Kipling’s If inscribed above the players’ entrance: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/And treat those two imposters just the same.”

You might think many players would scoff at these sentiments. No doubt some do. But back in 2008, before they contested what many regard as the greatest final of all time, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer jointly recorded the entire poem, speaking alternative passages in turn. I’m not sure who had the Triumph and Disaster bit, but Nadal triumphed – 6-4, 6-4, 6-7, 6-7, 9-7, in four hours 48 minutes.

Kipling himself was rather dismissive of his best-known poem. He said it consisted of “counsels of perfection most easy to give”. But despite If’s enduring popularity, Kipling himself has for long been something of an outcast from the canon of British poetry.

His decline has been traced to 1891 when he published a poem, The English Flag (actually the Union Jack), boastful of the British Empire, whose expansion it urged.

Later poems such as The White Man’s Burden, which suggested a duty upon white nations to ‘civilise’ others, placed him further beyond the politically-correct pale.

Schools have avoided him like the plague – and probably still do. But, according to new biographer Andrew Lycett, he is being reassessed by scholars and in universities. “There is much more of a willingness to look at him afresh and see what was good about him,” he says.

Besides If there are other Kipling poems that have always remained popular. The Way Through the Woods, for instance, about an abandoned road on which the ghostly sounds of former travellers might be heard, is a staple of poetry request programmes. But I knew little of Kipling’s verse until, at the end of a TV play about the death of his son, a Lieutenant in the Irish Guards, in the First World War, the actor David Hughes, playing Kipling, spoke Kipling’s poem My Boy Jack.

Though its ostensible subject is a seaman Jack, representing the many who died in the Battle of Jutland, the poem is also taken as lament for Kipling’s own son, John, known as Jack: “‘Have you news of my boy Jack’?/ Not this tide./ ‘When d’you think that he’ll come back?’ Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.”

This sent me out to buy Kipling’s Selected Poems in the Penguin Classics. Amid, yes, much reactionary pro-colonial stuff the selection bears out Andrew Lycett’s claim that Kipling spans “so many genres”. There’s a delightful poem about a cat, for example. And Kipling’s feeling for the common man is evident in lines such as this "epitaph of war": “We were together since the war began./He was my servant – and the better man.”

But what chiefly comes across is Kipling’s robust good sense. “If once you have paid him the Dane-geld/ You never get rid of the Dane.”

And, if you can get beyond its off-putting title, you’ll find The Gods of the Copybook Holdings brilliantly delivers a key message for our times – the importance of living within our means.