A people’s poet

A people’s poet remembered

People and Places
Michael Commins

FOR many years, like thousands of others, I have been fascinated by the stories, verses and musings of Robert Service, the man who cast his own spell through his wonderful and insightful reflections on life in the Yukon territories of Canada. It is impossible not to be moved by the brilliance of his narrative tales and his deep insight into the human psyche.
Born in 1874 in Preston, England, to Scottish parents, he was basically of Scottish background, having been schooled in Glasgow prior to emigrating to Canada at the age of 21. After various jobs, he found himself a post with the Bank of Commerce and an assignment to Whitehorse and later Dawson.
His eight years in Yukon were to transform his life … he loved the majestic, sweeping beauty of this vast region. Almost all of the writings for which he is revered today come from this part of his life. Each summer in the Land of the Midnight Sun, people still come to Dawson to visit the log cabin where he penned some of his classics.
It was a lovely letter and booklet from Terry Reilly in Ballina (former editor of The Western People) that provided the impetus for this week’s ‘special’ on Robert Service. Terry and Mary are just back from a trip to Alaska, and he picked up a booklet featuring a number of Robert Service’s poems which he posted to me.
“I knew you’d like the material, so I got one for you. It is a beautiful part of the world. We visited Skagway, which played a central role in the famous Klondike Gold Rush of 1897/98. Thousands poured onto the streets on their way north, headed for Dawson city more than 500 miles inland,” says Terry.
When Robert Service died in 1958, an obituary in a Chicago newspaper noted: “He was not a poet’s poet. Fancy-Dan dilettantes will dispute the description ‘great’. He was a people’s poet. To the people he was great. They understood him and knew that any verse carrying the byline of Robert W Service would be a lilting tahing, clear, clean and power-packed, beating out a story with a dramatic intensity that made the nerves tingle. And he was no poor, garret-type poet, either.
“His stuff made money hand over fist. One piece alone, The Shooting of Dan McGrew, rolled up half-a-million dollars for him. He lived it up well and also gave a great deal to help others.
“Too bad there are not more poets like Service, and fewer who seem to be talking to themselves in wispy symbolisms that resemble nothing so much as the maunderings of 3am drunks at a bar.”
Who cannot but become engrossed in the opening lines of his classic, ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’:

“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 Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam ’round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he’d often say in his homely way that he’d “sooner live in hell.”

And over several more verses, Service spins out the great yarn of the man from Tennessee. It has been performed in countries all over the world, handed down with renewed vitality in each generation.
Or how about Dangerous Dan McGrew, that marvellous tale that can hold you spellbound to the finish. Again, the opening lines set the scene:

“A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-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.
When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.
There was none could place the stranger’s face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;
But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.”

Service wrote about life as he found it and, like John Steinbeck and his wonderful reflections on Mexican-Americans on the margins in Monterey in his delightful novel ‘Tortilla Flat’ (1935), his world was far removed from genteel society. He would have detested the suffocating PC mentality of recent times.
“The only society I like,” Service once said, “is that which is rough and tough – and the tougher the better. That’s where you get down to bedrock and meet human people.” It was that kind of society that he found in the Yukon gold rush, and he was at peace with himself and the world.