by Jessie Seigel, AIW Board Member
On this day, when we in the D.C. area are having our second heavy snow storm in a week (the first having deposited upwards of thirty inches of snow in places), and I look out my window at the tree branches weighed down by a foot of the white stuff and at the wall of white blowing past at forty-plus miles per hour, I keep thinking of the Yukon I have never seen. And I find it is a joy to sit in a warm, cozy apartment, drink a cup of cocoa, and pull out Robert W. Service’s collection of poems, Ballads of a Cheechako. (Copyright, 1909—yes, I like old things.)
Admittedly, Robert W. Service is neither Shakespeare nor Yeats, but, from the slightly gruesome humor of The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill to the desperate My Friends, he has a wonderful ability to make one visualize the isolation of the frozen north and the effect it has on men. The down to earth quality of his characters reflects the elemental life they must live to survive in their environment, and the rhythm of Service’s ballad form accentuates the tongue-in-cheek humor or the intensity of his pieces.
For example, in The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill, the narrator has taken a contract to bury Bill MacKie, “whenever, wherever, or whatsoever the manner of the death he die.” Bill dies in the far north; the narrator packs up Bill’s coffin on his sleigh and goes off to bring Bill back and bury him. He finds Bill frozen to death:
Ice, white ice, like a winding-sheet, sheathing each smoke-grimed wall;
Ice on the stove-pipe, ice on the bed, ice gleaming over all;
Sparkling ice on the dead man’s chest, glittering ice in his hair,
Ice on his fingers, ice in his heart, ice in his glassy stare;
Hard as a log and trussed like a frog, with his arms and legs outspread.
I gazed at the coffin I’d brought for him, and I gazed at the gruesome dead,
And at last I spoke: “Bill liked his joke; but still, goldarn his eyes,
A man had ought to consider his mates in the way he goes and dies.”
Have you ever stood in an Arctic hut in the shadow of the Pole,
With a little coffin six by three and a grief you can’t control?
Have you ever sat by a frozen corpse that looks at you with a grin,
And that seems to say: “You may try all day, but you’ll never jam me in?”
I’m not a man of the quitting kind, but I never felt so blue
As I sat there gazing at that stiff and studying what I’d do.
Then I rose and I kicked off the husky dogs that were nosing round about,
And I lit a roaring fire in the stove, and I started to thaw Bill out.
In My Friends, the narrator, suffering from frostbite and craving the release of death, is saved by a murderer and a thief who struggle with determination against the elements to take him to the Mounted Police, even though it will surely end in prison or death for them. In part, the trip is described:
And the camps we made when their strength out-played
and the day was pinched and wan;
And oh, the joy of that blessed halt, and how I
did dread the dawn;
And how I hated the weary men who rose and
dragged me on.
And oh, how I begged to rest, to rest—the snow
was so sweet a shroud;
And oh, how I cried when they urged me on, cried
and cursed them aloud;
Yet on they strained, all racked and pained, and
sorely their backs were bowed.
I don’t know whether these excerpts can do the work justice. Since they are story-poems, it may be that one needs to read them in their entirety to fully appreciate them. But I hope that they give one enough of a sense of his work that those who do not know of him, or only know his ballad, The Shooting of Dan McGrew, may be moved, on some snow-bound day, to look up these ballads and give him a read.
***
Jessie Seigel is an AIW board member. Her fiction has appeared in such publications as Ontario Review, Gargoyle, Elan, and the anthology Electric Grace. Her poetry has been featured bi-weekly in the Boston Jewish Times. She is an associate editor at The Potomac Review.
