The Land God Forgot



The lonely sunsets flare forlorn
    Down valleys dreadly desolate;
The lordly mountains soar in scorn
    As still as death, as stern as fate.

The lonely sunsets flame and die;
    The giant valleys gulp the night;
The monster mountains scrape the sky,
    Where eager stars are diamond-bright.

So gaunt against the gibbous moon,
    Piercing the silence velvet-piled,
A lone wolf howls his ancient rune --
    The fell arch-spirit of the Wild.

O outcast land! O leper land!
    Let the lone wolf-cry all express
The hate insensate of thy hand,
    Thy heart's abysmal loneliness.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 20, 2023

28 sec read
200

Quick analysis:

Scheme AXAX BCBC DEDE FXFX
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 574
Words 94
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4

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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