The Spell of the Yukon by Robert Service

The Spell of the Yukon, recueil de poèmes de Robert Service

About the Author

Born on January 16, 1874, in Lancashire, England, Robert William Service was a Scottish descendant. His father was a Scotland banker who had been transferred to England. His family later moved to Glasgow, and he was schooled there.

He moved to Canada at the age of 21 when he quit his job in a Glasgow bank. He arrived in Vancouver Island and drifted around that region taking and quitting in between a series of jobs.

He was hired by the Canadian Bank of Commerce and being posted to a number of its branches. In 1904, he was sent to the branch in the Yukon Territory, some six years after the Klondike Gold Rush.

Robert Service did not actually partake in the Klondike Gold Rush, rather, he spent a great deal of his time in the Yukon listening to and looking for tales and stories from those who were. These conversations with locals became his source of inspiration, as a result, led him to write about things he experienced, hadn't seen and interestingly, many of which hadn't actually happened, as well

Robert Service had a magical knack for putting what happened around him, which encompassed that world into fine piece of poetry, and convey compelling stories in ways that typical short stories simply couldn’t. He rose to fame after he wrote two poems "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee. He earned the nick-name People’s Poet, and through his works, he often called "the Bard of the Yukon".

Robert Service left Yukon for good in 1912. He spent his later years carefree in France as a Bohemian. He served in the first World War as an ambulance man. He died on September 11, 1958 at the age of 84.

Service’s two-room rented cabin in the Yukon, in which he wrote a few more novels and poetry, was taken over by Parks Canada in 1971, and maintained as a historic site for tourists till this day.

The Spell of the Yukon by Robert Service

The Spell of the Yukon is one of Service’s early poetry works. The collection is centred round the life of frontiers and prospectors in Yukon during the God Rush. It gives visions of hardship and heartbreak in a wry, folksy tone amidst the desolate, deadly allure of the North.

These poems capture the bold, rugged and the uninhibited characteristics of these men, working hard during the day, suffering through loneliness at night, and throwing themselves into the arms of booze and girls on paydays.

Readers get to read rhyming poetry about the beauty of the Yukon wilderness and loneliness of the Yukon. It opens the window on history and culture of the land which is stunning and deadly at the same time.

Service’s poetry is evocative and beautiful, never snobbish nor confusing. It’s very straight forward which allows readers no trouble imagining the scenery he's describing.

The verse was sometimes crude and the subject sometimes heavy, still, his words seem to pierce to the core of the wanderer's darkest fears, to the heart of the men, and the man, who just don't fit in. Even the most amusing of the poems carry a message of the grim challenge of life in the Yukon. Such is the rhythm which is so insistent and compelling.

Allow The Spell of Yukon poems transports us back to that frozen place in the wild, when it was literally every man and every woman for him/herself, follow these beautiful lyrical and flowing ballads and poems, in its own grandeur and emotion, appreciate that wilderness, adventure, and a piece of history of the Yukon.

In the spirit of live and let live, and sometimes kill or be killed, he wrote in Grin

There's nothing gained by whining, and you're not that kind of stuff;

You're a fighter from away back, and you WON'T take a rebuff;

Your trouble is that you don't know when you have had enough —

Don't give in.

If Fate should down you, just get up and take another cuff;

You may bank on it that there is no philosophy like bluff,

And grin.

This is a Project Gutenberg's The Spell of the Yukon by Robert Service.