L’Envoi
We’ve finished up the filthy war;
We’ve won what we were fighting for...
(Or have we? I don’t know).
But anyway I have my wish:
I’m back upon the old Boul’ Mich’,
And how my heart’s aglow!
Though in my coat’s an empty sleeve,
Ah! do not think I ever grieve
(The pension for it, I believe,
Will keep me on the go).
So I’ll be free to write and write,
And give my soul to sheer delight,
Till joy is almost pain;
To stand aloof and watch the throng,
And worship youth and sing my song
Of faith and hope again;
To seek for beauty everywhere,
To make each day a living prayer
That life may not be vain.
To sing of things that comfort me,
The joy in mother-eyes, the glee
Of little ones at play;
The blessed gentleness of trees,
Of old men dreaming at their ease
Soft afternoons away;
Of violets and swallows’ wings,
Of wondrous, ordinary things
In words of every day.
To rhyme of rich and rainy nights,
When like a legion leap the lights
And take the town with gold;
Of taverns quaint where poets dream,
Of cafes gaudily agleam,
And vice that’s overbold;
Of crystal shimmer, silver sheen,
Of soft and soothing nicotine,
Of wine that’s rich and old,
Of gutters, chimney-tops and stars,
Of apple-carts and motor-cars,
The sordid and sublime;
Of wealth and misery that meet
In every great and little street,
Of glory and of grime;
Of all the living tide that flows—
From princes down to puppet shows—
I’ll make my humble rhyme.
So if you like the sort of thing
Of which I also like to sing,
Just give my stuff a look;
And if you don’t, no harm is done—
In writing it I’ve had my fun;
Good luck to you and every one—
And so
Here ends my book.
Notes
While ‘Stephen Poore’ is a fictional character, he is real enough in some ways. Robert Service was himself in the Ambulance Corps, and his descriptions of ‘Bohemia’ of this day, and the emergence of war, bear striking similarities to the case of Alan Seeger—and, no doubt, a great many other ‘war poets’ of the “Great War”. It has been said that every section of the trench had its own poet, and many of them, such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves, became famous for their poetry of the war. This book, in its way, presents a striking picture of the effect of the war on Europe—though it stops short of showing just how great the effect was.
I hope you enjoyed Service’s references to himself in the text, as “Sourdough Service”—but they should not be taken too seriously.
The names of two great Russian composers, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, were originally spelled Tschaikowsky and Stravinski in “The Philistine and the Bohemian”. These composers were contemporaries of the author, and due to the difficulty of transliterating from the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet to the Roman Alphabet, hampered by different uses of Roman letters in various European languages, it is not until fairly recently that the current spellings have taken hold—and their grip is not yet firm. A couple of other names were given incorrectly in the same poem: Mallarmé was spelled with one L, and E. Burne-Jones (a pre-Raphaelite painter and associate of Rossetti) was given as F. B. Jones. These names are corrected in this text, as is Synge, given as Singe in the original (“L’Escargot D’Or”).
Alan R. Light, Monroe, North Carolina, June 1997.
This list of books written by Robert Service is probably incomplete, possibly incorrect, but may serve as a starting point for those interested in his works.
Novels:
The Trail of ’98—A Northland Romance (1910)
The Pretender
The Poisoned Paradise
The Roughneck
The Master of the Microbe
The House of Fear (1927)
Autobiography:
Ploughman of the Moon (1945) | A two-volume
Harper of Heaven (1948) | autobiography.
Miscellaneous:
Why Not Grow Young
Verse:
* The Spell of the Yukon (1907) a.k.a. Songs of a Sourdough
* Ballads of a Cheechako (1909)
1
* Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1912)
* Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (1916)
* Ballads of a Bohemian (1921)
Bar-room Ballads (1940)
The Complete Poems (The first 6 books)
Songs of a Sunlover
Rhymes of a Roughneck
Lyrics of a Low Brow
Rhymes of a Rebel
The Collected Poems
Songs For My Supper (1953)
Rhymes For My Rags (1956)
* Books marked by an asterisk are presently online.
Notes
1 A Sourdough is an old-timer, while a Cheechako is a newbie.