Old Bob



I guess folks think I'm mighty dumb
         Since Jack and Jim and Joe
Have hit the trail to Kingdom Come
         And left me here below:
Since Death, the bastard, bowled them out,
         And left me faced with--Doubt.
         
My pals have all passed out on me
         And I am by my lone;
Old Bill was last, and now I see
         His name cut on a stone;
A marble slab, but not as fine
         As I have picked for mine.

I nurse and curse rheumatic pain
         As on the porch I sit;
With nothing special in my brain
         I rock and smoke and spit:
When one is nearing to the end
         One sorely needs a friend.

My Pals have gone,--in God's good earth
         I guess they're packed up snug,
And since I have no guts for mirth
             I zipper to my mug:
The question that I ponder on
             Is--where the heck they've gone?

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 14, 2023

47 sec read
87

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABABCC DEDEFF GHGHII JKJKXX
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 840
Words 154
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 6, 6, 6, 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…

All Robert William Service poems | Robert William Service Books

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