Robert William Service

“ I have followed its lure, fearless, familiar, alone;
By all that the battle means and makes I claim that land for mine own;
Yet the Wild must win, and a day will come when I shall be overthrown.
Then when as wolf-dogs fight we've fought, the lean wolf-land and I;
Fought and bled till the snows are red under the reeling sky;
Even as lean wolf-dog goes down will I go down and die. ”

“ There's a land where the mountains are nameless,
⁠And the rivers all run God knows where;
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
⁠And deaths that just hang by a hair;
There are hardships that nobody reckons;
⁠There are valleys unpeopled and still;
There's a land—oh, it beckons and beckons,
⁠And I want to go back—and I will.
They're making my money diminish;
⁠I'm sick of the taste of champagne.
Thank God! when I'm skinned to a finish
⁠I'll pike to the Yukon again.
I'll fight—and you bet it's no sham-fight ”

“ Of cities leaping to stature, of fame like a flag unfurled,
As I pour the tide of my riches in the eager lap of the world."
This is the Law of the Yukon, that only the Strong shall thrive;
That surely the Weak shall perish, and only the Fit survive. ”

“ The North-wind swoops from the brooding Pole, and our ancients crash and roar;
But where one falls from the crumbling walls shoots up a hardy score.
We spring from the gloom of the canyon's womb; in the valley's lap we lie ”

“ If you leave the gloom of London and you seek a glowing land,
⁠Where all except the flag is strange and new,
There's a bronzed and stalwart fellow who will grip you by the hand,
⁠And greet you with a welcome warm and true ”

“ Your sweethearts, sons, ye scornful ones—'tis I who know their shame.
The gods, ye see, are brutes to me—and so I play my game.
For life is not the thing we thought, and not the thing we plan;
And Woman in a bitter world must do the best she can—
Must yield the stroke, and bear the yoke, and serve the will of man ”

“ Sagas of men of earth
⁠Humanly suffering,
⁠Such as you all have done;
⁠Savagely faring forth,
⁠Sons of the midnight sun,
⁠Argonauts of the North.
Far in the land God forgot
⁠Glimmers the lure of your trail;
Still in your lust are you taught
⁠Even to win is to fail. ”

“ And she wondered why my lips were chill,
⁠Why I was silent and kissed her so.
⁠A year has gone and the moon is bright,
⁠A gibbous moon, like a ghost of woe;
⁠I sit by a new-made grave to-night,
⁠And my heart is broken—it's strange, you kuow. ”

“ There was triumph, triumph, triumph down the scarlet gleaming street;
⁠The town was mad; a man was like a boy.
A thousand flags were flaming where the sky and city meet;
⁠A thousand bells were thundering the joy. ”

“ Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us;
⁠Let us journey to a lonely land I know.
There's a whisper on the night-wind, there's a star agleam to guide us,
⁠And the Wild is calling, calling . . . let us go. ”

“ I've sweated athirst in its summer heat, I've frozen and starved in its cold;
I've followed my dreams by its thousand streams, I've toiled and moiled for its gold.
"Look at my eyes—been snow-blind twice; look where my foot's half gone;
And that gruesome scar on my left cheek, where the frost-fiend bit to the bone.
Each one a brand of this devil's land, where I've played and I've lost the game,
A broken wreck with a craze for 'hooch,' and never a cent to my name.
"This mining is only a gamble; the worst is as good as the best ”

“ There's a cry from out the loneliness—oh, listen, Honey, listen!
⁠Do you hear it, do you fear it, you're a-holding of me so?
You're a-sobbing in your sleep, dear, and your lashes, how they glisten—
⁠Do you hear the Little Voices all a-begging me to go?
All a-begging me to leave you. Day and night they're pleading, praying,
⁠On the North-wind, on the West-wind, from the peak and from the plain ”

“ Lofty I stand from each sister land, patient and wearily wise,
With the weight of a world of sadness in my quiet, passionless eyes;
Dreaming alone of a people, dreaming alone of a day,
When men shall not rape my riches, and curse me and go away ”

“ He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee;
And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee.
There wasn't a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,
With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid, because of a promise given;
It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: "You may tax your brawn and brains,
But you promised true, and it's up to you to cremate those last remains."
Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code. ”

“ Along the road to Anywhere, when each day had its story;
⁠When time was yet our vassal, and life's jest was still unstale;
When peace unfathomed filled our hearts as, bathed in amber glory,
⁠Along the road to Anywhere we watched the sunsets pale?
Alas! the road to Anywhere is pitfalled with disaster ”

“ The waves tell of ocean spaces,
⁠Of hearts that are wild and brave,
Of populous city places,
⁠Of desolate shores they lave,
Of men who sally in quest of gold
⁠To sink in an ocean grave.
The wind is a mighty roamer ”

“ You can't sleep here, you know.
⁠Say! ain't you got no sentiment? Lift up your muddled head;
Have a drink to the glad New Year, a drop before you go—
⁠You darned old dirty hobo . . . My God! Here, boys! He's dead! ”

“ No one cares a cent about you,
⁠You don't care a cent for life;
Hard luck has of hope bereft you,
⁠Health is failing, wish you'd die—
Why, you've still the sunshine left you
⁠And the big, blue sky. ”

“ Don't you remember that long, last waltz, with its sobbing, sad refrain?
⁠Don't you remember that last good-by, and the dear eyes dim with tears?
Don't you remember that golden dream, with never a hint of pain,
⁠Of lives that would blend like an angel-song in the bliss of the coming years?
Oh, what have I lost! What have I lost! Ethel, forgive, forgive!
⁠The red, red rose is faded now, and it's fifty years ago.
'Twere better to die a thousand deaths than live each day as I live! ”

“ Howled out their woes to the homeless snows—O God! how I loathed the thing.
And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;
And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;
The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in ”

“ But oh! so cramful of cosy joy, and crowned with a woman's love—
A woman dearer than all the world, and true as Heaven is true—
(God! how ghastly she looks through her rouge,—the lady that's known as Lou.) ”

“ He sees his white sheep dapple o'er the green New Zealand plain,
⁠And where Vancouver's shaggy ramparts frown,
When the sunlight threads the pine-gloom he is fighting might and main
⁠To clinch the rivets of an Empire down. ”

“ But I've lived my life as I found it, and I've done my best to be good;
I, the primitive toiler, half naked and grimed to the eyes,
Sweating it deep in their ditches, swining it stark in their styes ”

“ And I know at the dawn she'll come reeling home with the bottles, one, two, three—
One for herself, to drown her shame, and two big bottles for me,
To make me forget the thing I am and the man I used to be. ”

“ Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
⁠I cremated Sam McGee.
Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he'd often say in his homely way that "he'd sooner live in hell."
On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.
Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see ”

“ A prima-donna in the shining past,
⁠But now a mother growing old and gray,
She thinks of how she held a people fast
⁠In thrall, and gleaned the triumphs of a day.
She sees a sea of faces like a dream ”

“ Life's been a jolly good joke on him,
⁠And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
⁠He was never meant to win;
He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone;
⁠He's a man who won't fit in. ”

“ Have you suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down, yet grasped at glory,
⁠Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole?
"Done things" just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,
⁠Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul? ”

“ And I hope that the year will see me out, and, thank God, no one will care—
Save maybe the little slim Siwash girl with the rose of shame in her hair.
She will come with the dawn, and the dawn is near ”

“ Then sweetly she mocked his scruples, and softly she him beguiled:
"You, who are verily man among men, speak with the tongue of a child.
We have outlived the old standards; we have burst, like an over-tight thong,
The ancient, outworn, Puritanic traditions of Right and Wrong."
Then the Master feared for His angel, and called him again to His side,
For oh, the woman was wondrous, and oh, the angel was tried! ”

“ 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. ”

“ We're the men of Magersfontein, we're the men of Spion Kop,
⁠Colenso—we're the men who had to pay.
We're the men who paid the blood-price. Shall the grave be all our gain?
⁠You owe us. Long and heavy is the score. ”

“ In the hush of my mountained vastness, in the flush of my midnight skies.
Plague-spots, yet tools of my purpose, so natheless I suffer them thrive,
Crushing my Weak in their clutches, that only my Strong may survive. ”

“ I am one of you no longer; by the trails my feet have broken,
⁠The dizzy peaks I've scaled, the camp-fire's glow;
By the lonely seas I've sailed in—yea, the final word is spoken,
⁠I am signed and sealed to nature. Be it so. ”

“ Life is a fiddler, and we all must dance.
⁠From gloom where mocks that will-o'-wisp, Free-will
I heard a voice cry: "Say, give us a chance."
Chance! Oh, there is no chance! The scene is set.
Up with the curtain! Man, the marionette,
⁠Resumes his part. The gods will work the wires. ”

“ When the sun of life's a-sinkin' you can see it 'way above,
⁠On the hill from out the shadder in a glory 'gin the sky,
An' your mother's voice is callin', an' her arms are stretched in love,
⁠An' somehow you're glad you're goin', an' you ain't a-scared to die ”

“ And hunger not of the belly kind, that's banished with bacon and beans,
But the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means;
For a fireside far from the cares that are, four walls and a roof above ”

“ I bade her sit in the model's seat
⁠And I painted her sitting there.
I hid all trace of her heart unclean;
⁠I painted a babe at her breast;
I painted her as she might have been
⁠If the Worst had been the Best. ”

“ But the stranger ways of earth know our pride and know our worth,
⁠And we go into the dark as fighters go.
Yes, we go into the night as brave men go,
Though our faces they be often streaked with woe ”

“ It's bully in a high-toned joint to eat and drink your fill,
But it's quite another matter when you
⁠Pay the bill.
It's great to go out every night on fun or pleasure bent;
To wear your glad rags always and to never save a cent;
To drift along regardless, have a good time every trip;
To hit the high spots sometimes, and to let your chances slip ”

“ But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I'll bet my poke they're true,
That one of you is a hound of hell . . . and that one is Dan McGrew."
Then I ducked my head, and the lights went out, and two guns blazed in the dark,
And a woman screamed, and the lights went up, and two men lay stiff and stark.
Pitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, was Dangerous Dan MGrew,
While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast of the lady that's known as Lou. ”

“ Sink to sleep at midnight, and although you're feeling tough,
⁠Yet grin.
There's nothing gained by whining, and you're not that kind of stuff;
You're a fighter from away back, and you won't take a rebuff ”

“ Of that lone birch tree on Bonanza, where the first big find was made.
"We were just like a great big family, and every man had his squaw,
And we lived such a wild, free, fearless life beyond the pale of the law ”

“ McGuffy is showing a bunch of the boys how Bob Fitzsimmons hit;
⁠The barman is talking of Tammany Hall, and why the ward boss got fired.
I'll just sneak into a corner and they'll let me alone a bit;
⁠The room is reeling round and round . . . O God! but I'm tired, I'm tired. . . .
*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*
Roses she wore on her breast that night. Oh, but their scent was sweet!
⁠Alone we sat on the balcony, and the fan-palms arched above;
The witching strain of a waltz by Strauss came up to our cool retreat,
⁠And I prisoned her little hand in mine, and I whispered my plea of love. ”