Rhymes of a Rolling Stone | Page 3

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ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*
Rhymes of a Rolling Stone

by Robert W. Service [British-born Canadian Poet -- 1874-1958.]
[Note on text: Italicized stanzas are indented 5 spaces.
Stanzas that
were italicized AND indented are indented 10 spaces. Italicized words
and phrases are capitalized.
Lines longer than 78 characters are
broken according to metre, and the continuation is indented two
spaces.]
[This etext is transcribed from the 1912 edition, 1917 printing. Some
very minor changes have been made in spelling and punctuation after
consulting another edition.]
I have no doubt at all the Devil grins,
As seas of ink I spatter.
Ye
gods, forgive my "literary" sins --
The other kind don't matter.
Rhymes of a Rolling Stone
by Robert W. Service
Author of "The Spell of the Yukon", "Ballads of a Cheechako", etc.
Contents
Prelude
A Rolling Stone
The Soldier of Fortune
The Gramaphone
at Fond-Du-Lac
The Land of Beyond
Sunshine
The Idealist

Athabaska Dick
Cheer
The Return
The Junior God
The
Nostomaniac
Ambition
To Sunnydale
The Blind and the Dead

The Atavist
The Sceptic
The Rover
Barb-Wire Bill
"?"
Just
Think!
The Lunger
The Mountain and the Lake
The Headliner
and the Breadliner
Death in the Arctic
Dreams Are Best
The
Quitter
The Cow-Juice Cure
While the Bannock Bakes
The Lost
Master
Little Moccasins
The Wanderlust
The Trapper's Christmas
Eve
The World's All Right

The Baldness of Chewed-Ear
The
Mother
The Dreamer
At Thirty-Five
The Squaw Man
Home
and Love
I'm Scared of it All
A Song of Success
The Song of the
Camp-Fire
Her Letter
The Man Who Knew
The Logger
The
Passing of the Year
The Ghosts
Good-Bye, Little Cabin
Heart o'

the North
The Scribe's Prayer
Rhymes of a Rolling Stone
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.
A Rolling Stone
There's sunshine in the heart of me,
My blood sings in the breeze;

The mountains are a part of me,
I'm fellow to the trees.
My golden
youth I'm squandering,
Sun-libertine am I;
A-wandering,
a-wandering,
Until the day I die.

I was once, I declare, a Stone-Age man,
And I roomed in the cool of a
cave;
I have known, I will swear, in a new life-span,
The fret and
the sweat of a slave:
For far over all that folks hold worth,
There
lives and there leaps in me
A love of the lowly things of earth,
And
a passion to be free.
To pitch my tent with no prosy plan,
To range and to change at will;

To mock at the mastership of man,
To seek Adventure's thrill.

Carefree to be, as a bird that sings;
To go my own sweet way;
To
reck not at all what may befall,
But to live and to love each day.
To make my body a temple pure
Wherein I dwell serene;
To care
for the things that shall endure,
The simple, sweet and clean.
To
oust out envy and hate and rage,
To breathe with no alarm;
For
Nature shall be my anchorage,
And none shall do me harm.
To shun all lures that debauch the soul,
The orgied rites of the rich;

To eat my crust as a rover must
With the rough-neck down in the
ditch.
To trudge by his side whate'er betide;
To share his fire at
night;
To call him friend to the long trail-end,
And to read his heart
aright.
To scorn all strife, and to view all life
With the curious eyes of a
child;
From the plangent sea to the prairie,
From the slum to the
heart of the Wild.
From the red-rimmed star to the speck of sand,

From the vast to the greatly small;
For I know that the whole for good
is planned,
And I want to see it all.
To see it all, the wide world-way,
From the fig-leaf belt to the Pole;

With never a one to say me nay,
And none to cramp my soul.
In
belly-pinch I will pay the price,
But God! let me be free;

For once I
know in the long ago,
They made a slave of me.
In a flannel shirt from earth's clean dirt,
Here, pal, is my calloused

hand!
Oh, I love each day as a rover may,
Nor seek to understand.

To ENJOY is good enough for me;
The gipsy of God am I;
Then
here's a hail to each flaring dawn!
And here's a cheer to the night
that's gone!
And may I go a-roaming on
Until the day I die!
Then every star