Ballads of a Bohemian

by Robert W. Service

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Genres: Poetry

156 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2002

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

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Service is a British/Canadian poet. Reading a recent facebook message from Louise Penny, I learned a bit more about Service. Penny quoted from a couple of his poems. I was curious and found this collection in the library. His work is sometimes lengthy and daunting. At other times he shows a wicked sense of humor and sarcasm. He is a different kind of poet and clearly a remarkable poet. I recommend at least checking some of his work.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's in the form of a memoir by an American poet starving in a garret in 1914 Paris. (Service lived in Paris for years -- he was a Klondike poetry mogul by then, although he did enjoy slumming by night with his doorman). Brief anecdotes in prose, along the lines of "Looking up, I saw a ragged girl selling flowers in the cafe," are followed by the verses the narrator wrote as a result. You get the feeling of song cues in a bad musical, or of an awkward "and then I wrote..." cabaret act.

Swaths of mediocre doggerel occasionally give way to gems, like a deliriously silly account of an expedition in the high Arctic to capture polar bear fleas for science -- it reads like something left over from "Songs of a Sourdough." But like the novel Service wrote about Left Bank artistes, "The Pretender," there's too much squick. Pauperized, alcoholic poets and painters breathe their last, haggard old women turn out to have once been beautiful girls lured into lives of sin, and sad-eyed children of the slums expire at an alarming rate.

And then World War I begins, the narrator (like Service himself) becomes an ambulance driver on the Western Front, and the mood shifts to horror -- I was going to say melodramatic horror, but for all I know it's realistic account of what the author saw. Critics will never think of Service as a war poet in the same class as, say, Rupert Brooke. But the effect is powerful, and if anything it's amplified by the incongruously jaunty meter. Memorable, but you'll need a strong stomach.

[Jeff Freeburg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Popular poet in his day. Boring now.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some fine poems in here (The Joy of Little Things) but the way the collection is structured was puzzling and made it feel very artificial.

[Peter Pactor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Service is one of my favorite poets, and I have enjoyed the poetry in his other books, but I think that this one is the best. As I glanced through the book, I resisted reading it, because he has prose passages interspersed among his various poems. Yet it seemed to me that this book written in 1921 is the work of a much more mature Robert Service.

It is a story about a bohemian (written in first person) who lives in a garret as a struggling artist and who describes the life around him, the city, the life of a struggling artist, and the characters he sees every day. All this takes place in pre-WWI Paris. Then the war breaks out on August 14, 1914, and the tone changes to fit the miseries of war and its aftermath.

This book touched my heartstrings. The poems were poignant capturing various and opposite emotions. To my thinking it is a novel in verse (mostly) and prose. I think it is a terrific book, and I recommend it enthusiastically.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I've found my soulmate. It was bound to happen at some point.

If a little bit of cradle robbing is allowed for, he's only a century too old. Also, he's dead. But those are minor obstacles in the grand scheme of things. Love will prevail.

p.s. I gave this three stars because it (via Kindle) has all the poems cut out. Blasphemy.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the title more than the actually poetry most of the time. Still, it was well suited to the period of my life in which I read it.

[Peri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed these ballads! Definitely worth reading if you like ballads.

[Steven Paschka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful

A combination and mix of thoughts, never quite read something quite like this…

But I plan to read something like it again

Well done.