Robert Service

Not to be confused with Robert Service (historian).

Robert William Service (circa 1905)
It is later than you think!

Robert William Service (16 January 1874 – 11 September 1958) was an English poet, educated in Scotland, who sailed to Canada in 1894.

Quotes

• Just 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
  • Mud

The Law of the Yukon (1907)

• 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)

• 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.

The Cremation of Sam McGee

The Northern Lights have seen queer sights

• 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.