Once as a teenager, when I was just coming into poetry, I chanced at a church jumble sale upon the ‘Collected Poems’ of Robert W. Service, and after a quick glance decided it was worth risking a threepenny bit on. For those deprived souls who know only our modern decimal currency, I should explain that in real money twelve pennies made one shilling while twenty shillings, and hence two hundred and forty pennies, made one pound. Back in the nineteen fifties a threepenny bit would get you a Mars bar, so it was a tough choice, but on the whole I don’t regret it. True, when I got the book home a lot of it seemed to me no better than doggerel, but here and there were poems about the Canadian Arctic that did give my young imagination the same kind of shiver I got from some of Jack London’s stories, and now get from more subtle vehicles like Barry Lopez’s ‘Arctic Dreams’ with its evocation of a strange inhuman beauty. This week’s offering ‘The Atavist’, for example, falls into the category of what I would now call good bad verse – Service was clearly much influenced by Kipling, and while this is a long way from Kipling at his best, it’s maybe not so far from Kipling at his second best.

Robert W. Service (1874-1958) was born in Lancashire of Scottish descent but moved to America and spent much time drifting from job to job, from Mexico to British Columbia before achieving fame as ‘the Bard of the Yukon’, initially on the strength of the immensely popular ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’, followed by ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’. His sales were phenomenal (he made the equivalent of three million dollars on his first book alone) but he seems to have remained a fairly modest and level-headed man, working in the First World War as a stretcher-bearer and ambulance driver, and dismissing his own work as ‘verse, not poetry…Yet I never wrote to please anyone but myself; it just happened.’ Which makes him, I think, a more honest and attractive figure than many a better poet, even if that, one must ruefully acknowledge, is not really what the game’s about.

The Atavist

What are you doing here, Tom Thorne, on the white top-knot o’ the world,
Where the wind has the cut of a naked knife and the stars are rapier keen?
Hugging a smudgy willow fire, deep in a lynx robe curled,
You that’s a lord’s own son, Tom Thorne — what does your madness mean?

Go home, go home to your clubs, Tom Thorne! home to your evening dress!
Home to your place of power and pride, and the feast that waits for you!
Why do you linger all alone in the splendid emptiness,
Scouring the Land of the Little Sticks on the trail of the caribou?

Why did you fall off the Earth, Tom Thorne, out of our social ken?
What did your deep damnation prove? What was your dark despair?
Oh with the width of a world between, and years to the count of ten,
If they cut out your heart to-night, Tom Thorne, her name would be graven there!

And you fled afar for the thing called Peace, and you thought you would find it here,
In the purple tundras vastly spread, and the mountains whitely piled;
It’s a weary quest and a dreary quest, but I think that the end is near;
For they say that the Lord has hidden it in the secret heart of the Wild.

And you know that heart as few men know, and your eyes are fey and deep,
With a ‘something lost’ come welling back from the raw, red dawn of life:
With woe and pain have you greatly lain, till out of abysmal sleep
The soul of the Stone Age leaps in you, alert for the ancient strife.

And if you came to our feast again, with its pomp and glee and glow,
I think you would sit stone-still, Tom Thorne, and see in a daze of dream,
A mad sun goading to frenzied flame the glittering gems of the snow,
And a monster musk-ox bulking black against the blood-red gleam.

I think you would see berg-battling shores, and stammer and halt and stare,
With a sudden sense of the frozen void, serene and vast and still;
And the aching gleam and the hush of dream, and the track of a great white bear,
And the primal lust that surged in you as you sprang to make your kill.

I think you would hear the bull-moose call, and the glutted river roar;
And spy the hosts of the caribou shadow the shining plain;
And feel the pulse of the Silences, and stand elate once more
On the verge of the yawning vastitudes that call to you in vain.

For I think you are one with the stars and the sun, and the wind and the wave and the dew;
And the peaks untrod that yearn to God, and the valleys undefiled;
Men soar with wings, and they bridle kings, but what is it all to you,
Wise in the ways of the wilderness, and strong with the strength of the Wild?

You have spent your life, you have waged your strife where never we play a part;
You have held the throne of the Great Unknown, you have ruled a kingdom vast:

. . . . .

But to-night there’s a strange, new trail for you, and you go, O weary heart!
To the place and rest of the Great Unguessed . . . at last, Tom Thorne, at last.

Robert W. Service