The Poems of Robert Service

by Robert W. Service

Robert Service's poems echo through the mountains of North America. His simple verse is easy to read, beckoning you to plow through these adventure stories. Among them are:

"The Rhyme of the Restless Ones" "The Black Sheep" "Carry On!" "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" "The Cremation of Sam McGee" "The Trapper's Christmas Eve" "The Lone Trail"

During the First World War, Robert Service was an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in France and a war correspondent. He was born in the United Kingdom in 1874, and went on to travel throughout Canada, the United States, Mexico and Europe. He died in 1958.

You may also be interested in his Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, available in eBook format.

Genres: Poetry

190 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1970

About the author

This author is the the British-Canadian writer of Yukon poetry. For the British historian of modern Russia, see Robert Service.

Robert William Service was born into a Scottish family while they were living in Preston, England. He was schooled in Scotland, attending Hillhead High School in Glasgow. He moved to Canada at the age of 21 when he gave up his job working in a Glasgow bank, and traveled to Vancouver Island, British Columbia with his Buffalo Bill outfit and dreams of becoming a cowboy.

He drifted around western North America, taking and quitting a series of jobs. Hired by the Canadian Bank of Commerce, he worked in a number of its branches before being posted to the branch in Whitehorse (not Dawson) in the Yukon Territory in 1904, six years after the Klondike Gold Rush. Inspired by the vast beauty of the Yukon wilderness, Service began writing poetry about the things he saw.

Conversations with locals led him to write about things he hadn't seen, many of which hadn't actually happened, as well. He did not set foot in Dawson City until 1908, arriving in the Klondike ten years after the Gold Rush, but his renown as a writer was already established.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Service.

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a decade or so mid-90's on I taught freshmen the "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" from a hardback collection which featured Bishop's "One Art" a page earlier! Aloudreading today as I walked, I was astonished at the poetic features Service shares, for instance, with Yeats, like medial caesura rhyming--rhymes that also characterize Welsh verse, like Dylan Thomas's. Welsh cynghanedd or "chiming" often includes internal assonance and rhyme.
"There was none could PLACE the stranger's FACE..."
"From a fireside FAR from the cares that ARE.."
"In a buckskin SHIRT tht was glazed with DIRT
he sat, and I saw him sway;
"Then his lips went IN in a kind of GRIN..."
His meter includes dactyls, maybe to enable his multiple uses of the talker's word, "And the..."
"AND THE stranger TURNED, AND his eyes they BURNED... (this line just before "buckskin shirt,"
above. Or also the talker's words, "But I...,"
"BUT I want to STATE, and my words are STRAIGHT,
AND I'll bet my poke they're true."
Service's verse (say those two words ten times fast, or add, "versus...") depends upon the monosyllable (as do many of Shakespeare's sonnets' first lines!) though RWS's are Americanisms, like "pinch" (to steal) and "poke" (wallet) essential for the concluding line,
"The woman that kissed him and--pinched his poke--
was the Lady that's known as Lou."

[Deborah Cleaves · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no better storytelling than what you find in a Robert Service book and this volume contains some of his most recognizable poems.

[James Swenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you hate poetry, perhaps you'll like this. Start with "The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill."

This edition has a nice introduction by Tad Tuleja, which I quote:

Because of the elitism of poetasters in this century, poetry has become a cloistered art. Thanks largely to the influence of Eliot and Pound, it is now possible for preeners without either their diligence or their imagination to go around calling themselves poets on the strength of free verse and bits of Dante....

This was not the case in Service's day.... Service's millions of fans may not have been able to tell free verse from free love, but they damn well knew what rhymed with McGee. And they recited his rhymes -- by the millions.

[Mark]

Read a lot of Robert Service summers at our lakehouse. I always liked the short simple style and his stories of travel. My favorites are, "The Spell of the Yukon," and "Ballads of a Bohemian".