Familiarity

Robert William Service 1874 – 1958



Familiarity some claim
          Can breed contempt,
So from it let it be your aim
          To be exempt.
Let no one exercise his brawn
          To slap your back,
Lest he forget your name is John,
          And call you Jack.

To those who crash your private pew
          Be sour as krout;
Don't let them see the real 'you,'
          And bawl you out.
Don't call your Cousin William--Bill,
          But formal be.
Have care! Beware and shun famil--
          Iarity.

I'm quite polite. My hat I doff
          But little say.
I give the crowd the big brush-off,
          And go my way.
To common folk I do not freeze,
          I am no snob:
But though my name is Robert, please
          Don't call me BOB.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

37 sec read
131

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABABXCXC DEDEFXFB GHGHIJIJ
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 697
Words 121
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 8

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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