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.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 19, 2023

52 sec read
141

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABAB CDCD CECE FGFG HIHIJJ
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 1,037
Words 173
Stanzas 5
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4, 6

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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