Church "Service"
The following selection is from an obscure book entitled Giant Hours with Poet Preachers, by William Stidger, published in 1918. Robert Service is included with poets Edwin Markham, Vachel Lindsay, Alan Seeger, John Oxenham, Alfred Noyes, John Masefield and Rupert Brooke.
Mentioned in this chapter and also featured in this volume is Joaquin Miller. Miller, as did Robert Service wrote of the Klondike Gold Rush. It should be noted that Miller was one of the stampeders in the rush and his poetry helped fuel the stampede to the North. Famous for his verse of the Californian Gold Rush, Miller boasted of traveling light to the Yukon, and was quoted in the press saying"that the North held "No chance of famine" and "The dangers and hardships and cost of getting through have been greatly exaggerated." His words would come back to haunt him as in 1897 he arrived in Dawson in December, snow blinded, missing his left ear, a portion of his big toe and a finger from frostbite. At age 60 he wintered in Dawson where he survived on the charity of others.*
Service on the other hand , did not arrive on the scene until long after the fact, but captured the event so well in verse and prose that he often is the one associated with the event. Joaquin Miller, although quite famous in the period he wrote is hardly a household name today. Service on the other hand remains one of the most read poets.
Chapter VIII
Robert Service, Poet of Virility
A Study of High Peaks and High Hopes; of White Snow 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 Rebert 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."
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 on 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?"
-Spell of the Yukon.
And the 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."
-Spell of the Yukon.
"Have you strung your soul in 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 a t 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?
-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-."
Sin and Death
The world is full of sin and death, and the former is so often the father of the other. Service has seen this in the far, hard, cruel northland as no other can see it. The hollowness of material things he learns from this land of yellow gold, the very soul of the material quest of the world. He learns that "It isn't the gold that we're wanting so much as just finding the gold:"
"There's gold, and its haunting and haunting;
It's luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It's the great, big broad land 'way up yonder,
It's the forest where silence has lease;
It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder
It's the stillness that fills me with peace"
-Spell of the Yukon
Or another Verse:
"I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave/
Was it famine or scurvy -I fought it:
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it -
Came out with a fortune last fall -
Yet somehow life's not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn't all."
-Spell of the Yukon.
Who has not learned that? Thank God for the lesson! Too many of us hurl our youths, aye, our lives into the grave learning that, and only come to know at last that Joaquin Miller was right when he said,
"All you can take in cold dead hand is what you have given away."
And how the warning against sin hurtles its way into your soul; it grip; its age; its power:
"It grips you like some kinds of sinning;
It twists you from foe to a friend
It seems it's been since the beginning;
It seems it will be to the end."
Sin is like that. Service is right! Sin lures, and calls under the guise of beauty. But sin, as John Masefield shows in "The Everlasting Mercy," is ugly. In the modern word of the street "Sin will get you. " Service says the same thing in "It grips you."
God and Heaven
Maybe you have never thought of God as the God of the trails and Alaskan reaches, but Service makes you see him as "The God of the trails untrod" in "The Heart of the Sourdough." He does not leave God out. Nor do these rough men of the avalanches, the frozen rivers, the gold trails, which are death trails. Indeed these are the very men who know God, for do not their "Lives just hang by a hair"?
"I knew it would call, or soon or late, as it calls in the whirring wings;
It's the olden lure, it's the golden lure, it's the lure of the timeless things,
And to-night, O, God of the trails untrod, how it whines in my heart-strings !"
-Spell of the Yukon.
his God leads to "The Land of Beyond," the heaven of the gold seeker:
"Thank God! there is always a Land of Beyond
For us who are true to the trail;
A vision to seek, a beckoning peak,
A farness that never will fail;
A pride in our soul that mocks at a goal,
A manhood that irks at a bond,
And try how we will, unattainable still,
Behold it, our Land of Beyond!"
-Rhymes of a Rolling Stone
And the northman cannot forget death, as we have suggested, because he is face to face with it all the time, at every turn of a river; at every step of every trail:
Just think!
"Just Think! some night the stars will gleam
Upon a cold , grey stone,
And trace a name with silver beam,
And lo! 'twill be your own.
"That night is speeding on to greet
Your epitaphic rhyme.
Your life is but a little beat
Within the heart of Time.
"A little gain, a little pain,
A laugh lest you may moan;
A little blame, a little fame,
A star Gleam on a Stone"
-Rhymes of a Rolling Stone
Perhaps it is because the men of the north are always so near to death and so conscious of death that they hold to the strict Puritanical rules of conduct that they do expressed in Service's "The Woman and the Angel," that story of the Angel who came down to earth and withstood all the temptations until he met the beautiful, sinning woman, and who was about to fall. Hear her tempt him:
"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 overtight 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 O, the woman was wondrous, and O, the angel was tried!
And deep in his hell sang the devil, and this was the strain of his song"
The ancient, outworn, Puritanic traditions of Right and Wrong."
-Spell of the Yukon
And I doubt not, but that we all need that warning not to give up "The ancient, outworn, Puritanic traditions of Right and Wrong."
Rhymes of a Red Cross Man
Here it is that we find a consciousness of the eternal creeping through the smoke and din and glare. Here, like the hard, dangerous life of the Alaskan trails, only harder and more dangerous; here amid war in "The fool" we catch six last lines that thrill us:
"He died with the glory of faith in his eyes,
And the glory of love in his heart
And though there's never a grave to tell,
Nor a cross to mark his fall,
Thank God we know that he "batted well"
In the last great game of all."
-Rhymes of a Red Cross Man.
And even amid the terrible thunder of war the "Lark" sings, as Service reminds us in his poem of that name, sings and points to heaven:
"Pure heart of song, do you not know
That we are making earth a hell"
Or is it that you try to show
Life still is joy and all is well?
Brave little wings! Ah, not in vain
You beat into that bit of blue"
Lo! we who pant in war's red rain
Lift shining eyes, see Heaven too!"
-Rhymes of a Red Cross Man.
To close this study of Service, which has run from the hard battle ground of the Alaskan trails to the harder battle ground of France; which has run from a study of white peaks and white lives, to high peaks and high hopes, through sin and death to heaven and the Father himself, I quote the closing lines of Service's "The Song of the Wage Slave," which will remind the reader in tone and spirit of Markham's " The Man with the Hoe":
"Master, I've filled my contract, Wrought in thy many lands;
Not by my sins wilt thou judge me, but by the work of my hands.
Master, I've done thy bidding, and the light is low in the west,
And the long, long shift is over -Master, I've earned it- Rest."
Above: Sheet Music, ca. 1898, which was dedicated to Joaquin Miller.
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