Someone once told me the only sure way to tell an American from a Canadian is to ask them if they’d ever heard of Robert W Service: Americans might answer yea or nay, Canadians will be affronted you asked.
Now, I don’t know whether that is, or was ever, true - but one thing is certain, the poetry of Robert W Service , "Bard of the Yukon", deserves a wider readership than Canada alone can muster.
The tightly rhymed ballad (Service’s speciality) is not a popular form these days; modern English poets tend to concern themselves with written verse and often ignore the rich oral tradition of which Service was a part. In England, his work seems little known and even less admired. Those who have heard of him often know only one of his poems: “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”. His other works are hardly ever remembered.
I grew up with a copy of Service's “Ballads of a Cheechako” and have always greatly admired his work. To me, his ballads have never seemed clunky or corny. Indeed, the ballad seems a fittingly heroic form for the task Service set himself – to tell tales of the “Men of the High North”.
My personal favorite from "Ballads of a Cheechako" is the "Ballad Of Blasphemous Bill" (it used to be my party piece), but the far darker "Ballad of the Brand" is also a notably powerful piece of work, and "Ballad of the Black Fox Skin", though overlong, shows Service at his best:-
There was Claw-fingered Kitty and Windy Ike living the life of shame,You can read the rest here.
When unto them in the Long, Long Night came the man-who-had-no-name;
Bearing his prize of a black fox pelt, out of the Wild he came.
His cheeks were blanched as the flume-head foam when the brown spring freshets flow;
Deep in their dark, sin-calcined pits were his sombre eyes aglow;
They knew him far for the fitful man who spat forth blood on the snow.
"Did ever you see such a skin?" quoth he; "there's nought in the world so fine--
Such fullness of fur as black as the night, such lustre, such size, such shine;
It's life to a one-lunged man like me; it's London, it's women, it's wine.
And I can't resist pointing to one of Service's simple gems: this sketch of one of life's perennial losers from "The Ballad of Hard-Luck Henry":
Now wouldn't you expect to find a man an awful crankHeh.
That's staked out nigh three hundred claims, and every one a blank;
That's followed every fool stampede, and seen the rise and fall
Of camps where men got gold in chunks and he got none at all;
That's prospected a bit of ground and sold it for a song
To see it yield a fortune to some fool that came along;
That's sunk a dozen bed-rock holes, and not a speck in sight,
Yet sees them take a million from the claims to left and right?
Now aren't things like that enough to drive a man to booze?
But Hard-Luck Smith was hoodoo-proof--he knew the way to lose.
