VIII
ROBERT SERVICE, POET OF VIRILITY
[Footnote: The poetical selections appearing in this chapter are used
by permission, and are taken from the following works: The Spell of the
Yukon; Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, published by Barse & Hopkins, New
York; Rhymes of a Rolling Stone, published by Dodd, Mead & Co., New
York.]
A STUDY OF HIGH PEAKS AND HIGH HOPES; OF WHITE SNOWS AND WHITE LIVES; OF SIN AND DEATH; OF HEAVEN AND GOD
A preacher once preached a sermon, and in the opening moments of this sermon he quoted eight lines, and a layman said at the conclusion of this sermon, "Ah, the sermon was fine, but those lines that you quoted—they were tremendous; they gripped me!" And those lines were from Robert Service, the poet of the Alaskan ice-peaks, of the Yukon's turbulent blue waters, of the great silences, of the high peaks and high hopes; of men and gold and sin and death.
And the lines that gripped the layman were:
"I've stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow
That's plumb-full of hush to the brim;
I've watched the big husky sun wallow
In crimson and gold, and grow dim;
Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming
And the stars tumbled out neck and crop;
And I've thought that I surely was dreaming
With the peace o' the world piled on top."
The Spell of the Yukon.
[Illustration: ROBERT SERVICE.]
Everything that the great northland holds was dear to him and clear to him and near to him. He knew it all as intimately as a child knows his own backyard. He makes it as dear and near and clear too, to those who read:
"The summer—no sweeter was ever,
The sunshiny woods all athrill;
The grayling aleap in the river,
The bighorn asleep on the hill;
The strong life that never knows harness,
The wilds where the caribou call;
The freedom, the freshness, the farness;
O God! how I'm stuck on it all!"
The Spell of the Yukon.
Virile as the mountains that he has neighbored with; clean as the snows that have blinded his eyes, and made beautiful the valleys; subdued to love of God through the height and the might of all that he sees, with a vigor that shakes one awake, he speaks, not forgetting the pines; for the pines are kith and kin to the mountains and the snows:
"Wind of the East, wind of the West, wandering to and fro,
Chant your hymns in our topmost limbs, that the sons of men may know
That the peerless pine was the first to come, and the pine will be
the last to go.
"Sun, moon, and stars give answer; shall we not staunchly stand
Even as now, forever, wards of the wilder strand,
Sentinels of the stillness, lords of the last, lone land?"
The Spell of the Yukon.
And these white peaks, and these lone sentinels lift one nearer to God:
"But the stars throng out in their glory,
And they sing of the God in man;
They sing of the Mighty Master,
Of the loom his fingers span,
Where a star or a soul is a part of the whole,
And weft in the wondrous plan.
"Here by the camp-fire's flicker,
Deep in my blanket curled,
I long for the peace of the pine-gloom,
Where the scroll of the Lord is unfurled,
And the wind and the wave are silent,
And world is singing to world."
The Spell of the Yukon.
"Have you strung your soul to silence?" he abruptly asks in "The Call of the Wild"; and again, another searching query, "Have you known the great White Silence, not a snow-gemmed twig aquiver? (Eternal truths which shame our soothing lies.)" And again another query that rips the soul open, and that tears off life's veneer:
"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,
See through the nice veneer the naked soul?"
The Spell of the Yukon.
and how his virile soul rings its tribute to the "silent men who do things!"—the kind that the world finds once in a century for its great needs:
"The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things—."
The Spell of the Yukon.