Robert Service
Robert William Service (16 January 1874 – 11 September 1958) was an English poet, educated in Scotland, who sailed to Canada in 1894.
It is later than you think!
Quotes
editJust have one more try - it's dead easy to die,
It's the keeping-on-living that's hard.
*ServiceWise & OtherWise (1942)
Oh it is good to ride and run,
To roam the reenwood
wild and free;
To hunt, to idle in the sun,
To leap into the laughing sea
*ServiceWise & OtherWise (1942)
I count each day a little life,
With birth and death complete;
I cloister it from care and strife
And keep it sane and sweet.
*ServiceWise & OtherWise (1942)
Marriage is a bachelor’s punishment for his sins
*ServiceWise & OtherWise (1942)
The world is full of scribbling Nobodies
who think they’re scribbling Somebodies.
*ServiceWise & OtherWise (1942)
Dignity is a tin god in the temple of bunk.
*ServiceWise & OtherWise (1942)
After fifty don’t go to a funeral if you can avoid it.
It’s bad enough to go to your own when times comes.
*ServiceWise & OtherWise (1942)
Wisdom is peace, peace wisdom.
Both are born of a humble heart and a nourished gratitude.
*ServiceWise & OtherWise (1942)
Nature is the nest professor in the end.
*ServiceWise & OtherWise (1942)
Some praise the Lord for Light,
The living spark;
I thank God for the Night
The healing dark.
*ServiceWise & OtherWise (1942)
- There's the wretched rent to pay,
Yet I glower at pen and ink:
Oh, inspire me, Muse, I pray,
It is later than you think!- Ballads of a Bohemian (1921), It is later than you think
- "It's coming soon and soon, mother, it's nearer every day,
When only men who work and sweat will have a word to say;
When all who earn their honest bread in every land and soil
Will claim the Brotherhood of Man, the Comradeship of Toil;
When we, the Workers, all demand: `What are we fighting for?' . . .
Then, then we'll end that stupid crime, that devil's madness -- War."- Ballads of a Bohemian (1921), Michael
- Mud is mankind in the moulding,
Heaven's mystery unfolding
The Law of the Yukon (1907)
edit- This is the law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain:
"Send not your foolish and feeble; send me your strong and your sane --
Strong for the red rage of battle; sane for I harry them sore;
Send me men girt for the combat, men who are grit to the core
- Wild and wide are my borders, stern as death is my sway;
From my ruthless throne I have ruled alone for a million years and a day
- This is the Law of the Yukon, that only the Strong shall thrive;
That surely the Weak shall perish, and only the Fit survive.
Dissolute, damned and despairful, crippled and palsied and slain,
This is the Will of the Yukon, -- Lo, how she makes it plain!
The Shooting of Dan McGrew (1907)
edit- A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a rag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.
- Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;
With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,
A helf-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow, and red, the North Lights swept in bars? —
Then you've a hunch what the music meant . . . hunger and night and the stars.
- But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I'll bet my poke they're true,
That one of you is a hound of hell . . . and that one is Dan McGrew.
- There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
- Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
- And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow.
It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don’t know why;
And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky.
