Robert W. Service

Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Prelude

          I sing no idle songs of dalliance days,
          No dreams Elysian inspire my rhyming;
          I have no Celia to enchant my lays,
          No pipes of Pan have set my heart to chiming.
          I am no wordsmith dripping gems divine
          Into the golden chalice of a sonnet;
          If love songs witch you, close this book of mine,
              Waste no time on it.
          Yet bring I to my work an eager joy,
          A lusty love of life and all things human;
          Still in me leaps the wonder of the boy,
          A pride in man, a deathless faith in woman.
          Still red blood calls, still rings the valiant fray;
          Adventure beacons through the summer gloaming:
          Oh long and long and long will be the day
              Ere I come homing!
          This earth is ours to love:  lute, brush and pen,
          They are but tongues to tell of life sincerely;
          The thaumaturgic Day, the might of men,
          O God of Scribes, grant us to grave them clearly!
          Grant heart that homes in heart, then all is well.
          Honey is honey-sweet, howe'er the hiving.
          Each to his work, his wage at evening bell
              The strength of striving.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: CAIMAN
• Erscheinungstermin: 2. Juli 2019
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9789881830692
• Artikelnr.: 59102084

Autorenporträt

Robert William Service, known as "the Bard of the Yukon," was a British-Canadian poet and author who lived from January 16, 1874, to September 11, 1958. William was given as a middle name in memory of a wealthy uncle. The middle name was deleted by Service after his uncle failed to provide provisions for him in his will. He was a bank clerk by trade, having been born in Lancashire of Scottish origin, but he also spent a lot of time traveling, frequently in extreme poverty, across the west of the United States and Canada. When his bank sent him to the Yukon, he was moved by stories of the Klondike Gold Rush and inspired to write two poems, "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee," which displayed a remarkable level of authenticity for a writer without any prior experience with gold mining and quickly gained popularity. Encouraged by this, he rapidly produced further songs on the same subject, which were later collected in Songs of a Sourdough (known in the United States as The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses) and sold in large quantities. When his subsequent collection Ballads of a Cheechako achieved the same level of success, Service was able to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle based in Paris and the French Riviera while traveling frequently.