ROBERT SERVICE, POET OF VIRILITY
[Footnote: The poetical selections appearing in this chapter are used
by permission, and are taken from the following works: The Spell of the
Yukon; Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, published by Barse & Hopkins, New
York; Rhymes of a Rolling Stone, published by Dodd, Mead & Co., New
York.]

A STUDY OF HIGH PEAKS AND HIGH HOPES; OF WHITE SNOWS AND WHITE LIVES; OF SIN AND DEATH; OF HEAVEN AND GOD

A preacher once preached a sermon, and in the opening moments of this sermon he quoted eight lines, and a layman said at the conclusion of this sermon, "Ah, the sermon was fine, but those lines that you quoted—they were tremendous; they gripped me!" And those lines were from Robert Service, the poet of the Alaskan ice-peaks, of the Yukon's turbulent blue waters, of the great silences, of the high peaks and high hopes; of men and gold and sin and death.

And the lines that gripped the layman were:

"I've stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow
That's plumb-full of hush to the brim;
I've watched the big husky sun wallow
In crimson and gold, and grow dim;
Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming
And the stars tumbled out neck and crop;
And I've thought that I surely was dreaming
With the peace o' the world piled on top."

The Spell of the Yukon.

[Illustration: ROBERT SERVICE.]

Everything that the great northland holds was dear to him and clear to him and near to him. He knew it all as intimately as a child knows his own backyard. He makes it as dear and near and clear too, to those who read:

"The summer—no sweeter was ever,
The sunshiny woods all athrill;
The grayling aleap in the river,
The bighorn asleep on the hill;
The strong life that never knows harness,
The wilds where the caribou call;
The freedom, the freshness, the farness;
O God! how I'm stuck on it all!"

The Spell of the Yukon.

Virile as the mountains that he has neighbored with; clean as the snows that have blinded his eyes, and made beautiful the valleys; subdued to love of God through the height and the might of all that he sees, with a vigor that shakes one awake, he speaks, not forgetting the pines; for the pines are kith and kin to the mountains and the snows:

"Wind of the East, wind of the West, wandering to and fro,
Chant your hymns in our topmost limbs, that the sons of men may know
That the peerless pine was the first to come, and the pine will be
the last to go.

"Sun, moon, and stars give answer; shall we not staunchly stand
Even as now, forever, wards of the wilder strand,
Sentinels of the stillness, lords of the last, lone land?"

The Spell of the Yukon.

And these white peaks, and these lone sentinels lift one nearer to God:

"But the stars throng out in their glory,
And they sing of the God in man;
They sing of the Mighty Master,
Of the loom his fingers span,
Where a star or a soul is a part of the whole,
And weft in the wondrous plan.

"Here by the camp-fire's flicker,
Deep in my blanket curled,
I long for the peace of the pine-gloom,
Where the scroll of the Lord is unfurled,
And the wind and the wave are silent,
And world is singing to world."

The Spell of the Yukon.

"Have you strung your soul to silence?" he abruptly asks in "The Call of the Wild"; and again, another searching query, "Have you known the great White Silence, not a snow-gemmed twig aquiver? (Eternal truths which shame our soothing lies.)" And again another query that rips the soul open, and that tears off life's veneer:

"Have you suffered, starved, and triumphed, groveled down,
yet grasped at glory,
Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole?
'Done things,' just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,
See through the nice veneer the naked soul?"

The Spell of the Yukon.

and how his virile soul rings its tribute to the "silent men who do things!"—the kind that the world finds once in a century for its great needs:

"The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things—."

The Spell of the Yukon.

SIN AND DEATH

The world is full of sin and death, and the former is so often the father of the other. Service has seen this in the far, hard, cruel northland as no other can see it. The hollowness of material things he learns from this land of yellow gold, the very soul of the material quest of the world. He learns that "It isn't the gold that we're wanting, so much as just finding the gold:"

"There's gold, and it's haunting and haunting;
It's luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn't the gold that I'm wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It's the great, big, broad land 'way up yonder,
It's the forests where silence has lease;
It's the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It's the stillness that fills me with peace."

The Spell of the Yukon.

Or another verse:

"I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it—
Came out with a fortune last fall—
Yet somehow life's not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn't all."

The Spell of the Yukon.

Who has not learned that? Thank God for the lesson! Too many of us hurl our youths, aye, our lives into the grave learning that, and only come to know at last that Joaquin Miller was right when he said,

"All you can take in your cold, dead hand
Is what you have given away."

And how the warning against sin hurtles its way into your soul; its grip; its age; its power:

"It grips you like some kinds of sinning;
It twists you from foe to a friend;
It seems it's been since the beginning;
It seems it will be to the end."

The Spell of the Yukon.

Sin is like that. Service is right! Sin lures, and calls under the
guise of beauty. But sin, as John Masefield shows in "The Everlasting
Mercy," is ugly. In the modern word of the street "Sin will get you."
Service says the same thing in "It grips you."

GOD AND HEAVEN

Maybe you have never thought of God as the God of the trails and Alaskan reaches, but Service makes you see him as "The God of the trails untrod" in "The Heart of the Sourdough." He does not leave God out. Nor do these rough men of the avalanches, the frozen rivers, the gold trails, which are death trails. Indeed, these are the very men who know God, for do not their "Lives just hang by a hair"?

"I knew it would call, or soon or late, as it calls the whirring
wings;
It's the olden lure, it's the golden lure, it's the lure of the
timeless things,
And to-night, O, God of the trails untrod, how it whines in
my heart-strings!"

The Spell of the Yukon.

This God leads to "The Land of Beyond," the heaven of the gold seeker:

"Thank God! there is always a Land of Beyond
For us who are true to the trail;
A vision to seek, a beckoning peak,
A farness that never will fail;
A pride in our soul that mocks at a goal,
A manhood that irks at a bond,
And try how we will, unattainable still,
Behold it, our Land of Beyond!"

Rhymes of a Rolling Stone.

And the northman cannot forget death, as we have suggested, because he is face to face with it all the time, at every turn of a river; at every jump from cake to floe, at every step of every trail:

JUST THINK!

"Just think! some night the stars will gleam
Upon a cold, grey stone,
And trace a name with silver beam,
And lo! 'twill be your own,

"That night is speeding on to greet
Your epitaphic rhyme.
Your life is but a little beat
Within the heart of Time.

"A little gain, a little pain,
A laugh lest you may moan;
A little blame, a little fame,
A star-gleam on a stone."

Rhymes of a Rolling Stone.

Perhaps it is because the men of the north are always so near to death and so conscious of death that they hold to the strict Puritanical rules of conduct that they do, expressed in Service's "The Woman and the Angel," that story of the Angel who came down to earth and withstood all the temptations until he met the beautiful, sinning woman, and who was about to fall. Hear her tempt him:

"Then sweetly she mocked his scruples, and softly she him beguiled:
'You, who are verily man among men, speak with the tongue of a child.
We have outlived the old standards; we have burst like an overtight
thong
The ancient outworn, Puritanic traditions of Right and Wrong.'"
"Then the Master feared for His angel, and called him again to His
side,
For O, the woman was wondrous, and O, the angel was tried!
And deep in his hell sang the devil, and this was the strain of his
song:
'The ancient, outworn, Puritanic traditions of Right and Wrong.'"

The Spell of the Yukon.

And I doubt not, but that we all need that warning not to give up "The ancient, outworn, Puritanic traditions of Right and Wrong."

RHYMES OF A RED CROSS MAN

Here it is that we find a consciousness of the Eternal creeping through
the smoke and din and glare. Here, like the hard, dangerous life of the
Alaskan trails, only harder and more dangerous; here amid war in "The
Fool" we catch six last lines that thrill us:

"He died with the glory of faith in his eyes,
And the glory of love in his heart.
And though there's never a grave to tell,
Nor a cross to mark his fall,
Thank God we know that he "batted well"
In the last great Game of all."

Rhymes of a Red Cross Man.

And even amid the terrible thunder of war the "Lark" sings, as Service reminds us in his poem of that name, sings and points to heaven:

"Pure heart of song! do you not know
That we are making earth a hell?
Or is it that you try to show
Life still is joy and all is well?
Brave little wings! Ah, not in vain
You beat into that bit of blue:
Lo! we who pant in war's red rain
Lift shining eyes, see Heaven too!"

Rhymes of a Red Cross Man.

To close this study of Service, which has run from the hard battle ground of the Alaskan trails to the harder battle ground of France; which has run from a study of white peaks and white lives, to high peaks and high hopes, through sin and death to heaven and the Father himself, I quote the closing lines of Service's "The Song of the Wage Slave," which will remind the reader in tone and spirit of Markham's "The Man with the Hoe":

"Master, I've filled my contract, wrought in thy many lands;
Not by my sins wilt thou judge me, but by the work of my hands.
Master, I've done thy bidding, and the light is low in the west,
And the long, long shift is over—Master, I've earned it—Rest."

[Illustration: RUPERT BROOKE.]

IX

RUPERT BROOKE
[Footnote: The poetical selections from the writings of Rupert Brooke
appearing in this chapter are used by permission, and are taken from
The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, published by John Lane Company,
New York.]

PREACHER OF FRIENDSHIP, LOVE, COUNTRY, GODS, AND GOD

Wilfred Gibson expressed it for us all; voiced the sorrow and the hope in the death of Rupert Brooke, a victim of the Hun as well as that other giant of art, the Rheims Cathedral; expressed it in these lines written shortly after Rupert Brooke died:

"He's gone.
I do not understand.
I only know
That, as he turned to go
And waved his hand,
In his young eyes a sudden glory shone,
And I was dazzled by a sunset glow—
And he was gone,"

Thanks, Wilfred Gibson, you who have made articulate the voice of the downtrodden of the world, the poetic "Fires" which have lighted up with sudden glow the slums, the slag heaps, the factories, the coal mines, and hidden common ways of folks who toil; thanks that you have also beautifully lighted up the "End of the Trail" of your friend and our friend, Poet Rupert Brooke; lighted it with the light that shines from eternity. We owe you debt unpayable for that.

And you yourself, war-dead poet, you sang your end, full knowing that it would come, as it did on foreign soil, far from the England that you loved and voiced so wondrously. And now these lines that you wrote of your own possible passing have new meaning for us who remain to mourn your going:

"If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England's breathing, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home."

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.

And so here, even in this hymn of your passing, you have given a striking illustration off one of your strongest characteristics, love of homeland. Poet of Youth who left us so early in life, take your place along with Byron, and Shelley, and our own Seeger—a quartette of immortals, whose voices were heard, but, like the horns of Elfland, "faintly blowing" when they were hushed. Though you were but a youthful voice, yet left you poetry worth listening to, and preached a gospel that will make a better world, though it had not gone far enough to save the world.

THE GOSPEL OF FRIENDSHIP

Among the few definite, outstanding gospels that Brooke preached is seen the gospel of friendship. In "The Jolly Company" he says:

"O white companionship! You only
In love, in faith unbroken dwell,
Friends, radiant and inseparable!"

"Light-hearted and glad they seemed to me
And merry comrades, even so
God out of heaven may laugh to see.—"

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.

Then, again, in a poem which he called "Lines Written in the Belief That the Ancient Roman Festival of the Dead Was Called Ambarvalia," he voices in an even more striking quatrain the immortality of friendship. What a thrill of hope runs through us here as we, who believe that life brings no richer gold than friendship, read this poet's thought that friendship too shall last beyond the years!

"And I know, one night, on some far height,
In the tongue I never knew,
I yet shall hear the tidings clear
From them that were friends of you.—"

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.

THE GOSPEL OF LOVE

And where Friendship sweeps into love who shall tell, or where the dividing line is? But while Brooks lived he forgot not love. His was a throbbing, beating love whose light was a beacon night and day; a beacon of which he was not ashamed. He set the fires of romantic love burning and when he went away he left them burning so that their light might light the way for other poets and other lovers and other travelers when they came. He believed, like Noyes, that love should not be weak; that that was the great hope. Noyes said:

"But one thing is needful, and ye shall be true
To yourselves and the goal and the God that ye seek;
Yea, the day and the night shall requite it to you
If ye love one another if your love be not weak."

From Collected Poems of Alfred Noyes.

Now I do not mean to suggest that the love that Brooke sang was exactly the type that Noyes sang in these four lines. In fact, one feels a difference as he reads the two English poets, but they are alike in that each agreed that Love should not be weak, whatever it was. Brooke sang of romantic love, high and holy as that is; love of Youth for Maiden, lad for lass, and man for woman; and thank God for the high clean song that he gave to it in such lines as in "The Great Lover":

"Love is a flame;—we have beaconed the world's night.
A city:—and we have built it, these and I.
An emperor:—we have taught the world to die."

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.

And again in that same great poem:

"—Oh, never a doubt but, somewhere, I shall wake,
And give what's left of love again, and make
New friends, now strangers…."

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.

THE GOSPEL OF LOVE FOR ONE'S COUNTRY

And who shall say where the line of cleavage is between that love which clings to Friends; and that greater or conjugal love which moulds man and woman into one; and love for children, blood of one's blood, and love of country; and love of God? I say that those who are truly the great Lovers of the world love all of these and that not one is omitted. At least the truly great Lovers have the capacity for love of all these types. I have found no expression of paternal love in Brooke, for he had not come to that great experience of life before Death claimed him. And because Death robbed him of that experience Death robbed us of a rare interpretation of that special type of Love. But of all these other types which I have mentioned we have a clear expression in the slender volume of poems that he left us as our heritage from his estate. And, since we have already read one beautiful expression of this love for his country in the opening paragraphs of this chapter, we will add here another stanza of that noble expression of his love for old England.

"And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven."

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.

What a voice for the times! What a voice for America! Would that some
American Brooke might arise to sing this same deep song.

A GOSPEL OF THE GODS

Rupert Brooke had a wide range of interests as indeed any great Lover of Life and living must have. He expressed the hopelessness of the heathen gods in a poem which he called "On the Death of Smet-Smet, the Hippopotomus-Goddess" in lines that fairly sparkle with the electricity of destruction and sarcasm:

"She was wrinkled and huge and hideous? She was our Mother.
She was lustful and lewd?—but a God; we had none other.
In the day She was hidden and dumb, but at nightfall moaned in the
shade;
We shuddered and gave Her Her will in the darkness; we were afraid.

(The People without)

"She sent us pain,
And we bowed before Her;
She smiled again
And bade us adore Her.
She solaced our woe
And soothed our sighing;
And what shall we do
Now God is dying?"

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.

And so it was that with the deepest sense of understanding, with the deepest sympathy, without intolerance Brooke, in this one verse sets the Heathen gods where they belong and sets us where we belong in our relations to those who worship these gods and goddesses. It is all they have. We have no right to sneer and scorn until we are able to give them better. These poor Egyptians knew no other God. They said plaintively "but a God; we have none other"; and "And what shall we do now God is dying?" The crime of destroying faith in a lesser god until one has seen and can make seeable the real God is the greatest crime of civilization. And to this writer's way of thinking there is no greater sin than that of Intolerance; a sin to which a certain portion of the institutionalized church is prone. Noyes shot the fist of indignation at this type of intolerance straight from a manly shoulder when he said:

"How foolish, then, you will agree
Are those who think that all must see
The world alike, or those who scorn
Another who, perchance, was born
Where in a different dream from theirs
What they called Sin to him were prayers?"

The Collected Poems of Alfred Noyes.

Brooke saw the same thing and had great tolerance for those who worshipped the "unknown gods"; worshipped the best they knew, although it were a feeble worship. He understood their outcry that they knew not what to do, now that their god was dying:

"She was so strong;
But death is stronger.
She ruled us long;
But time is longer.
She solaced our woe
And soothed our sighing;
And what shall we do
Now God is dying?"

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.

THE GOSPEL OF ONE GOD

Then sweeping upward, although one must admit, with groping, reaching eagerness, this young poet tried to find, and at last did find, the one God. He mentions this God that he found more than any other one thing about which he wrote, so far as I can find. In one slender volume are more than a dozen striking references. Take for example the last fifteen lines of "The Song of the Pilgrims":

"O Thou,
God of all long desirous roaming,
Our hearts are sick of fruitless homing,
And crying after lost desire.
Hearten us onward! as with fire
Consuming dreams of other bliss.
The best Thou givest, giving this
Sufficient thing—to travel still
Over the plain, beyond the hill,
Unhesitating through the shade,
Amid the silence unafraid,
Till, at some hidden turn, one sees
Against the black and muttering trees
Thine altar, wonderfully white,
Among the Forests of the Night."

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.

Or again, from "Ambarvalia":

"But laughing and half-way up to heaven,
With wind and hill and star,
I yet shall keep before I sleep,
Your Ambarvalia."

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.

Immortality, which goes hand in hand with the God of immortality, the God of the "Everlasting Arms," is voiced in "Dining-Room Tea," a poem addressed to one whom he loved:

"For suddenly, and other whence,
I looked on your magnificence.
I saw the stillness and the light,
And you, august, immortal, white,
Holy and strange; and every glint,
Posture and jest and thought and tint
Freed from the mask of transiency,
Triumphant in eternity,
Immote, immortal."

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.

Then, speaking of the war and peace with great yearning and great faith, the young poet cried a new glory in what he calls "God's Hour" in a poem on "Peace":

"Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth and wakened us from sleeping,
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping."

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.

And who has not felt this, but has not been able to thus express it? And who has not seen that somehow, strangely, mysteriously, wondrously, the youth not only of England, but of America has leaped to "God's Hour," as Brooke calls this war; leaped from play, and from listlessness in spiritual things; leaped from indifference to things of the eternities; leaped to a magnificent heroism, selflessness, sacrifice, brotherhood; leaped to a new and Godlike nobility.

To all who mourn for their dead lads comes the cheering word of Brooke, who himself paid the great debt of love. It comes out of a poem called "Safety." Read it, you who mourn, and be comforted:

"Dear! of all happy in the hour, most blest
He who has found our hid security,
Assured in the dark tides of the world that rest,
And hear our word, 'Who is so safe as we?'
'We have found safety with all things undying!'"

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.

"We have found safety with all things undying." Brooke heard God's word as did the prophet of old crying, "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith the Lord," and this sonnet comes as a personal message to mourning mother and father in America. As they listen they hear the voices of those they loved crying: "Who is so safe as we? We have found safety with all things undying." Thank God that this poet, though young, lived long enough, and saw enough of war and death to give this heartening word to a world which weeps and wearies with war and woe and want! Thus in this new immortality we shall

"Learn all we lacked before; hear, know and say
What this tumultuous body now denies:
And feel, who have laid our groping hands away;
And see, no longer blinded by our eyes."

The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke.

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