Over the past nine months, between avoiding COVID and battling cancer, my world, as many of you, has been restricted to living within the confines of home and interacting with only close loved ones. This week I was finally going venture out and travel to our family condo in Orange Beach but Hurricane Sally quashed that. So, home and family love remains the core of my daily existence. Its commonness can dull its luster. As such, I’ve dipped into my vault of past Inspirations for this week’s selection. This one initially appeared on August 24, 2012, but it is an apt description of the enduring blessing of home and love, especially in 2020.
I recall when attending grammar school back in the early 1960’s one of the activities students were offered was called Elocution. We were given poems and told to memorize them and then stand in front of the class and recite them with appropriate expression and feeling. It was here that I was first introduced to Robert W. Service. I found him to be quite intriguing. With verses containing titles such as The Cremation of Sam McGee, The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill, The Spell of the Yukon, and The Shooting of Dan McGraw, Service seemed every inch a man’s man poet. His bio confirms that assessment.
He was born in 1874 in Preston, Lancashire, England and was the eldest child of 10. He composed his first poem at the age of 6 while living with his paternal grandfather and maiden aunts in Scotland. A mischievous youth, Robert always dreamt of adventure and going to sea.
Following in his father’s footsteps, Robert trained as a bank cashier. His regular income afforded him enough time to write, earn extra money, and read Browning, Tennyson, Thackery, and Keats. He attended the University of Glasgow and studied English Language and Literature. After a promotion at the bank, Robert began working on his physical condition while saving money and dreaming of someday being a cowboy in Western Canada.
In 1895, at the age of 21, Robert announced his intentions to emigrate to Canada, and resigned his position at the bank. He set sail for Montreal with one suitcase and a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Amateur Emigrant.” From Montreal, he travelled by train across Canada until he reached Vancouver Island. For six months he learned to milk cows, weed gardens, make hay, work an axe and cross cut saw, pick apples and ride horseback.
The next few years saw a lot of travel and odd jobs for Robert throughout Western Canada and the Yukon. He met a lot of interesting people, and fell in love with their stories. He heard the story of a prospector who cremated his partner one day, and his lyrical version of it ended up in a collection that he sent to his father. While Robert had intended the collection to be published for “vanity only,” to be given to friends & family as gifts, if ever, a publisher offered him a check along with terms for publication rights and his career as a writer was established. Service left the Yukon in 1912, and though he never returned to the area, it would remain a part of his writing life and lore.
During the First World War he served in an America volunteer ambulance unit and became a war correspondent for the Canadian government. Following the war he travelled and wrote two volumes of poetry and several novels. While travelling in Europe, Service married a woman from Paris and purchased a villa in Brittany. With the outbreak of the Second World War he escaped from Poland to Hollywood where he lived in exile until the end of the war and his return to France.
Throughout his lifetime, Robert published six novels, two autobiographical works, over 45 verse collections and some 1,200 poems. He died on September 11, 1958.
The following obituary appeared in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph of Sept. 16, 1958:
A GREAT POET died last week in Lancieux, France, at the age of 84.
He was not a poet’s poet. Fancy-Dan dilettantes will dispute the description “great.” He was a people’s poet. To the people he was great. They understood him, and knew that any verse carrying the by-line of Robert W. Service would be a lilting thing, clear, clean and power-packed, beating out a story with a dramatic intensity that made the nerves tingle. And he was no poor, garret-type poet, either. His stuff made money hand over fist. One piece alone, The Shooting of Dan McGrew, rolled up half a million dollars for him. He lived it up well and also gave a great deal to help others.
“The only society I like,” he once said, “is that which is rough and tough – and the tougher the better. That’s where you get down to bedrock and meet human people.” He found that kind of society in the Yukon gold rush, and he immortalized it.
I’m not sure when Service penned the following verse, but I found it to be very different in both style and substance from what he is typically associated with. Different though it may be, it is obviously reflective of his deeply held feelings and, thus, quite inspirational.
Home and Love
Robert William Service
Just Home and Love! the words are small
Four little letters unto each;
And yet you will not find in all
The wide and gracious range of speech
Two more so tenderly complete:
When angels talk in Heaven above,
I’m sure they have no words more sweet
Than Home and Love.
Just Home and Love! it’s hard to guess
Which of the two were best to gain;
Home without Love is bitterness;
Love without Home is often pain.
No! each alone will seldom do;
Somehow they travel hand and glove:
If you win one you must have two,
Both Home and Love.
And if you’ve both, well then I’m sure
You ought to sing the whole day long;
It doesn’t matter if you’re poor
With these to make divine your song.
And so I praisefully repeat,
When angels talk in Heaven above,
There are no words more simply sweet
Than Home and Love.
Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn’t the mountain ahead that wears you out – it’s the grain of sand in your shoe. – Robert W. Service
William “Bill” Bacque