Analysis of To The Man Of The High North



My rhymes are rough, and often in my rhyming
        I've drifted, silver-sailed, on seas of dream,
Hearing afar the bells of Elfland chiming,
        Seeing the groves of Arcadie agleam.

I was the thrall of Beauty that rejoices
        From peak snow-diademed to regal star;
Yet to mine aerie ever pierced the voices,
        The pregnant voices of the Things That Are.

The Here, the Now, the vast Forlorn around us;
        The gold-delirium, the ferine strife;
The lusts that lure us on, the hates that hound us;
        Our red rags in the patch-work quilt of Life.

The nameless men who nameless rivers travel,
        And in strange valleys greet strange deaths alone;
The grim, intrepid ones who would unravel
        The mysteries that shroud the Polar Zone.

These will I sing, and if one of you linger
        Over my pages in the Long, Long Night,
And on some lone line lay a calloused finger,
        Saying: "Lo! It's human-true--it hits me right";
Then will I count this loving toil well spent;
Then will I dream awhile--content, content.


Scheme ABAB CDCD CECE FGFG HIHIJJ
Poetic Form
Metre 11110100110 1101011111 100101111 10011101 110111011 11111101 11110101010 0101010111 01010101011 010100011 01111101111 10110011111 01011101010 0011011101 01010111010 0100110101 11110111110 1011000111 01111101010 10111011111 1111110111 1111011010
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 1,037
Words 173
Sentences 7
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4, 6
Lines Amount 22
Letters per line (avg) 34
Words per line (avg) 8
Letters per stanza (avg) 151
Words per stanza (avg) 34
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 19, 2023

52 sec read
141

Robert William Service

Robert William Service was a poet and writer sometimes referred to as the Bard of the Yukon He is best-known for his writings on the Canadian North including the poems The Shooting of Dan McGrew The Law of the Yukon and The Cremation of Sam McGee His writing was so expressive that his readers took him for a hard-bitten old Klondike prospector not the later-arriving bank clerk he actually was Robert William Service was born 16 January 1874 in Preston England but also lived in Scotland before emigrating to Canada in 1894 Service went to the Yukon Territory in 1904 as a bank clerk and became famous for his poems about this region which are mostly in his first two books of poetry He wrote quite a bit of prose as well and worked as a reporter for some time but those writings are not nearly as well known as his poems He travelled around the world quite a bit and narrowly escaped from France at the beginning of the Second World War during which time he lived in Hollywood California He died 11 September 1958 in France Incidentally he played himself in a movie called The Spoilers starring John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich more…

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