Robert William Service (January 16, 1874 – September 11, 1958) was a British-Canadian poet and writer, often called "the Bard of the Yukon".
Born in Lancashire of Scottish descent, he was a bank clerk by
trade, but spent long periods travelling in Western America and Canada,
often in some poverty. When his bank sent him to the Yukon, he was
inspired by tales of the Klondike Gold Rush, and wrote two poems "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee",
which carried remarkable authenticity from an author with no experience
of gold-mining, and enjoyed immediate popularity. Encouraged by this,
he quickly wrote more poems on the same theme, which were published as Songs of a Sourdough (re-titled The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses in the US.), and achieved a massive sale. When his next collection Ballads of a Cheechako
proved equally successful, Service could afford to travel widely and
live a leisurely life, basing himself in Paris and the French Riviera.
Partly because of their popularity, and the speed with which he
wrote them, his works were dismissed as doggerel by the critics, who
were tending to say the same of Kipling, with whom Service was often compared. This did not worry Service, who was happy to classify his work as “verse, not poetry”.
An Olive Fire
An olive fire's a lovely thing;
Somehow it makes me think of Spring
As in my grate it over-spills
With dancing flames like daffodils.
They flirt and frolic, twist and twine,
The brassy fire-irons wink and shine. . . .
Leap gold, you flamelets! Laugh and sing:
An olive fire's a lovely thing.
An olive fire's a household shrine:
A crusty loaf, a jug of wine,
An apple and a chunk of cheese -
Oh I could be content with these.
But if my curse of oil is there,
To fry a fresh-caught fish, I swear
I do not envy any king,
As sitting by my hearth I sing:
An olive fire's a lovely thing.
When old and worn, of life I tire,
I'll sit before an olive fire,
And watch the feather ash like snow
As softly as a rose heart glow;
The tawny roots will loose their hoard
Of sunbeams centuries have stored,
And flames like yellow chicken's cheep,
Till in my heart Peace is so deep:
With hands prayer-clasped I sleep . . . and sleep.
Somehow it makes me think of Spring
As in my grate it over-spills
With dancing flames like daffodils.
They flirt and frolic, twist and twine,
The brassy fire-irons wink and shine. . . .
Leap gold, you flamelets! Laugh and sing:
An olive fire's a lovely thing.
An olive fire's a household shrine:
A crusty loaf, a jug of wine,
An apple and a chunk of cheese -
Oh I could be content with these.
But if my curse of oil is there,
To fry a fresh-caught fish, I swear
I do not envy any king,
As sitting by my hearth I sing:
An olive fire's a lovely thing.
When old and worn, of life I tire,
I'll sit before an olive fire,
And watch the feather ash like snow
As softly as a rose heart glow;
The tawny roots will loose their hoard
Of sunbeams centuries have stored,
And flames like yellow chicken's cheep,
Till in my heart Peace is so deep:
With hands prayer-clasped I sleep . . . and sleep.
I like a lot of modern poetry 'save for it's name - to me unrhymed words
are prose so call it proemtry or prosery or some other word of choice - but those
rules of rhyming and meter that set the bar to give a meaning to
emotion of thought call forth skills that elude the finest thoughts of
the unrhymed verse - so perhaps 'old and worn I tire'.
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