# Robert Service

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

* 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.