'The Ballad Of The Northern Lights' by Robert Service
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One of the Down and Out--that's me. Stare at me well, ay, stare!
Stare and shrink--say! you wouldn't think that I was a millionaire.
Look at my face, it's crimped and gouged--one of them death-mask things;
Don't seem the sort of man, do I, as might be the pal of kings?
Slouching along in smelly rags, a bleary-eyed, no-good bum;
A knight of the hollow needle, pard, spewed from the sodden slum.
Look me all over from head to foot; how much would you think I was worth?
A dollar? a dime? a nickel? Why, I'm the wealthest man on earth.
No, don't you think that I'm off my base. You'll sing a different tune
If only you'll let me spin my yarn. Come over to this saloon;
Wet my throat--it's as dry as chalk, and seeing as how it's you,
I'll tell the tale of a Northern trail, and so help me God, it's true.
I'll tell of the howling wilderness and the haggard Arctic heights,
Of a reckless vow that I made, and how I staked the Northern Lights.
Remember the year of the Big Stampede and the trail of Ninety-eight,
When the eyes of the world were turned to the North, and the hearts of men elate;
Hearts of the old dare-devil breed thrilled at the wondrous strike,
And to every man who could hold a pan came the message, "Up and hike".
Well, I was there with the best of them, and I knew I would not fail.
You wouldn't believe it to see me now; but wait till you've heard my tale.
You've read of the trail of Ninety-eight, but its woe no man may tell;
It was all of a piece and a whole yard wide, and the name of the brand was "Hell".
We heard the call and we staked our all; we were plungers playing blind,
And no man cared how his neighbor fared, and no man looked behind;
For a ruthless greed was born of need, and the weakling went to the wall,
And a curse might avail where a prayer would fail, and the gold lust crazed us all.
Bold were we, and they called us three the "Unholy Trinity";
There was Ole Olson, the Sailor Swede, and the Dago Kid and me.
We were the discards of the pack, the foreloopers of Unrest,
Reckless spirits of fierce revolt in the ferment of the West.
We were bound to win and we revelled in the hardships of the way.
We staked our ground and our hopes were crowned, and we hoisted out the pay.
We were rich in a day beyond our dreams, it was gold from the grass-roots down;
But we weren't used to such sudden wealth, and there was the siren town.
We were crude and careless frontiersmen, with much in us of the beast;
We could bear the famine worthily, but we lost our heads at the feast.
The town looked mighty bright to us, with a bunch of dust to spend,
And nothing was half too good them days, and everyone was our friend.
Wining meant more than mining then, and life was a dizzy whirl,
Gambling and dropping chunks of gold down the neck of a dance-hall girl;
Till we went clean mad, it seems to me, and we squandered our last poke,
And we sold our claim, and we found ourselves one bitter morning--broke.
The Dago Kid he dreamed a dream of his mother's aunt who died--
In the dawn-light dim she came to him, and she stood by his bedside,
And she said: "Go forth to the highest North till a lonely trail ye find;
Follow it far and trust your star, and fortune will be kind."
But I jeered at him, and then there came the Sailor Swede to me,
And he said: "I dreamed of my sister's son, who croaked at the age of three.
From the herded dead he sneaked and said: `Seek you an Arctic trail;
'Tis pale and grim by the Polar rim, but seek and ye shall not fail.'"
And lo! that night I too did dream of my mother's sister's son,
And he said to me: "By the Arctic Sea there's a treasure to be won.
Follow and follow a lone moose trail, till you come to a valley grim,
On the slope of the lonely watershed that borders the Polar brim."
Then I woke my pals, and soft we swore by the mystic Silver Flail,
'Twas the hand of Fate, and to-morrow straight we would seek the lone moose trail.
We watched the groaning ice wrench free, crash on with a hollow din;
Men of the wilderness were we, freed from the taint of sin.
The mighty river snatched us up and it bore us swift along;
The days were bright, and the morning light was sweet with jewelled song.
We poled and lined up nameless streams, portaged o'er hill and plain;
We burnt our boat to save the nails, and built our boat again;
We guessed and groped, North, ever North, with many a twist and turn;
We saw ablaze in the deathless days the splendid sunsets burn.
O'er soundless lakes where the grayling makes a rush at the clumsy fly;
By bluffs so steep that the hard-hit sheep falls sheer from out the sky;
By lilied pools where the bull moose cools and wallows in huge content;
By rocky lairs where the pig-eyed bears peered at our tiny tent.
Through the black canyon's angry foam we hurled to dreamy bars,
And round in a ring the dog-nosed peaks bayed to the mocking stars.
Spring and summer and autumn went; the sky had a tallow gleam,
Yet North and ever North we pressed to the land of our Golden Dream.
So we came at last to a tundra vast and dark and grim and lone;
And there was the little lone moose trail, and we knew it for our own.
By muskeg hollow and nigger-head it wandered endlessly;
Sorry of heart and sore of foot, weary men were we.
The short-lived sun had a leaden glare and the darkness came too soon,
And stationed there with a solemn stare was the pinched, anaemic moon.
Silence and silvern solitude till it made you dumbly shrink,
And you thought to hear with an outward ear the things you thought to think.
Oh, it was wild and weird and wan, and ever in camp o' nights
We would watch and watch the silver dance of the mystic Northern Lights.
And soft they danced from the Polar sky and swept in primrose haze;
And swift they pranced with their silver feet, and pierced with a blinding blaze.
They danced a cotillion in the sky; they were rose and silver shod;
It was not good for the eyes of man--'twas a sight for the eyes of God.
It made us mad and strange and sad, and the gold whereof we dreamed
Was all forgot, and our only thought was of the lights that gleamed.
Oh, the tundra sponge it was golden brown, and some was a bright blood-red;
And the reindeer moss gleamed here and there like the tombstones of the dead.
And in and out and around about the little trail ran clear,
And we hated it with a deadly hate and we feared with a deadly fear.
And the skies of night were alive with light, with a throbbing, thrilling flame;
Amber and rose and violet, opal and gold it came.
It swept the sky like a giant scythe, it quivered back to a wedge;
Argently bright, it cleft the night with a wavy golden edge.
Pennants of silver waved and streamed, lazy banners unfurled;
Sudden splendors of sabres gleamed, lightning javelins were hurled.
There in our awe we crouched and saw with our wild, uplifted eyes
Charge and retire the hosts of fire in the battlefield of the skies.
But all things come to an end at last, and the muskeg melted away,
And frowning down to bar our path a muddle of mountains lay.
And a gorge sheered up in granite walls, and the moose trail crept betwixt;
'Twas as if the earth had gaped too far and her stony jaws were fixt.
Then the winter fell with a sudden swoop, and the heavy clouds sagged low,
And earth and sky were blotted out in a whirl of driving snow.
We were climbing up a glacier in the neck of a mountain pass,
When the Dago Kid slipped down and fell into a deep crevasse.
When we got him out one leg hung limp, and his brow was wreathed with pain,
And he says: "'Tis badly broken, boys, and I'll never walk again.
It's death for all if ye linger here, and that's no cursed lie;
Go on, go on while the trail is good, and leave me down to die."
He raved and swore, but we tended him with our uncouth, clumsy care.
The camp-fire gleamed and he gazed and dreamed with a fixed and curious stare.
Then all at once he grabbed my gun and he put it to his head,
And he says: "I'll fix it for you, boys"--them are the words he said.
So we sewed him up in a canvas sack and we slung him to a tree;
And the stars like needles stabbed our eyes, and woeful men were we.
And on we went on our woeful way, wrapped in a daze of dream,
And the Northern Lights in the crystal nights came forth with a mystic gleam.
They danced and they danced the devil-dance over the naked snow;
And soft they rolled like a tide upshoaled with a ceaseless ebb and flow.
They rippled green with a wondrous sheen, they fluttered out like a fan;
They spread with a blaze of rose-pink rays never yet seen of man.
They writhed like a brood of angry snakes, hissing and sulphur pale;
Then swift they changed to a dragon vast, lashing a cloven tail.
It seemed to us, as we gazed aloft with an everlasting stare,
The sky was a pit of bale and dread, and a monster revelled there.
We climbed the rise of a hog-back range that was desolate and drear,
When the Sailor Swede had a crazy fit, and he got to talking queer.
He talked of his home in Oregon and the peach trees all in bloom,
And the fern head-high, and the topaz sky, and the forest's scented gloom.
He talked of the sins of his misspent life, and then he seemed to brood,
And I watched him there like a fox a hare, for I knew it was not good.
And sure enough in the dim dawn-light I missed him from the tent,
And a fresh trail broke through the crusted snow, and I knew not where it went.
But I followed it o'er the seamless waste, and I found him at shut of day,
Naked there as a new-born babe--so I left him where he lay.
Day after day was sinister, and I fought fierce-eyed despair,
And I clung to life, and I struggled on, I knew not why nor where.
I packed my grub in short relays, and I cowered down in my tent,
And the world around was purged of sound like a frozen continent.
Day after day was dark as death, but ever and ever at nights,
With a brilliancy that grew and grew, blazed up the Northern Lights.
They rolled around with a soundless sound like softly bruised silk;
They poured into the bowl of the sky with the gentle flow of milk.
In eager, pulsing violet their wheeling chariots came,
Or they poised above the Polar rim like a coronal of flame.
From depths of darkness fathomless their lancing rays were hurled,
Like the all-combining search-lights of the navies of the world.
There on the roof-pole of the world as one bewitched I gazed,
And howled and grovelled like a beast as the awful splendors blazed.
My eyes were seared, yet thralled I peered through the parka hood nigh blind;
But I staggered on to the lights that shone, and never I looked behind.
There is a mountain round and low that lies by the Polar rim,
And I climbed its height in a whirl of light, and I peered o'er its jagged brim;
And there in a crater deep and vast, ungained, unguessed of men,
The mystery of the Arctic world was flashed into my ken.
For there these poor dim eyes of mine beheld the sight of sights--
That hollow ring was the source and spring of the mystic Northern Lights.
Then I staked that place from crown to base, and I hit the homeward trail.
Ah, God! it was good, though my eyes were blurred, and I crawled like a sickly snail.
In that vast white world where the silent sky communes with the silent snow,
In hunger and cold and misery I wandered to and fro.
But the Lord took pity on my pain, and He led me to the sea,
And some ice-bound whalers heard my moan, and they fed and sheltered me.
They fed the feeble scarecrow thing that stumbled out of the wild
With the ravaged face of a mask of death and the wandering wits of a child--
A craven, cowering bag of bones that once had been a man.
They tended me and they brought me back to the world, and here I am.
Some say that the Northern Lights are the glare of the Arctic ice and snow;
And some that it's electricity, and nobody seems to know.
But I'll tell you now--and if I lie, may my lips be stricken dumb--
It's a mine, a mine of the precious stuff that men call radium.
I'ts a million dollars a pound, they say, and there's tons and tons in sight.
You can see it gleam in a golden stream in the solitudes of night.
And it's mine, all mine--and say! if you have a hundred plunks to spare,
I'll let you have the chance of your life, I'll sell you a quarter share.
You turn it down? Well, I'll make it ten, seeing as you are my friend.
Nothing doing? Say! don't be hard--have you got a dollar to lend?
Just a dollar to help me out, I know you'll treat me white;
I'll do as much for you some day . . . God bless you, sir; good-night.
Editor 1 Interpretation
The Ballad Of The Northern Lights: A Masterpiece of Poetic Storytelling
The Ballad Of The Northern Lights is a masterpiece of poetic storytelling, written by Robert Service, a man who spent much of his life in the Canadian wilderness. This epic ballad captures the beauty and mystery of the Northern Lights, a natural phenomenon that has captivated people's imaginations for centuries. In this essay, I will explore the themes and literary devices used in this poem, and how they contribute to its timeless appeal.
Background and Inspiration
Before delving into the poem itself, it's important to understand the context in which it was written. Robert Service was born in 1874 in Scotland but spent much of his life in Canada, where he worked as a banker before becoming a full-time writer. He was known for his vivid descriptions of the Canadian wilderness and his ability to capture the spirit of the people who lived there.
It is said that Service was inspired to write The Ballad Of The Northern Lights after witnessing the aurora borealis while on a trip to the Yukon in 1907. This experience had a profound impact on him, and he was compelled to put his thoughts and observations into poetic form.
Themes and Literary Devices
One of the most prominent themes in this poem is the power of nature. Service uses vivid imagery and descriptive language to convey the awe-inspiring beauty of the Northern Lights, which he describes as "a flaming sword in the sky". He also portrays the natural world as something to be respected and revered, as demonstrated in these lines:
"For they're the scourge of the Red Gods' hate,
They're the curse of the wandering Witch-wife's mate,
They're the dance of the dead men's souls set free
From the chains of the flesh--by the Northern Sea."
Service's use of personification is another literary device that adds depth and interest to the poem. He gives the Northern Lights human-like qualities, such as "dancing" and "flashing", which bring them to life in the reader's mind. This technique is used to great effect in the following lines:
"They're the pipes of the devils' revelry,
That naught on earth may tame;
The icy spear of the warrior's pride,
And the wizard's wand of flame."
Another important theme in this poem is the passage of time. Service alludes to the idea that the Northern Lights have been around for centuries and will continue to be a source of wonder for generations to come. He writes:
"But though mankind will longer live
They'll never find the clue,
For they're but the torches of the Viking dead
King Canute and his crew."
This idea of continuity and the passing down of traditions and knowledge from one generation to the next is an important part of Service's vision of the world.
Analysis and Interpretation
At its core, The Ballad Of The Northern Lights is a story about the power of nature and the human spirit. The Northern Lights are portrayed as a force to be reckoned with, something that cannot be controlled or tamed by mere mortals. Yet at the same time, they are a source of inspiration and wonder, something that can uplift and inspire the human soul.
Service's use of vivid imagery and descriptive language is what makes this poem so memorable and timeless. His ability to paint a picture with words is truly remarkable, and it is this talent that has made him one of the most beloved poets of his generation.
In conclusion, The Ballad Of The Northern Lights is a masterpiece of poetic storytelling that captures the beauty and mystery of one of nature's most awe-inspiring phenomena. Through his use of literary devices and themes, Robert Service has created a work of art that speaks to the human experience and reminds us of our connection to the natural world. This poem is a testament to the power of language and the enduring nature of great art.
Editor 2 Analysis and Explanation
The Ballad of the Northern Lights: A Poem of Wonder and Mystery
Robert Service's The Ballad of the Northern Lights is a classic poem that captures the awe-inspiring beauty and mystery of the aurora borealis. With its vivid imagery and haunting melody, the poem transports the reader to the frozen wilderness of the North, where the shimmering lights dance across the sky like a celestial ballet.
At its core, The Ballad of the Northern Lights is a celebration of the natural world and its power to inspire wonder and awe in the human heart. The poem opens with a description of the Northern Lights themselves, as Service writes:
"Have you ever heard the wind go 'Yooooo'? 'Tis a pitiful sound to hear! It seems to chill you through and through With a strange and speechless fear. 'Tis the voice of the Polar night, The soul of the lonely light, Of the Northern Lights."
Here, Service sets the stage for the poem's central theme: the power of nature to evoke both fear and wonder in the human soul. The wind's mournful cry is a reminder of the harshness of the Arctic landscape, where life is a constant struggle against the elements. Yet, at the same time, the Northern Lights themselves are a source of wonder and beauty, a reminder of the majesty of the natural world.
As the poem continues, Service weaves a tale of a young man who sets out into the wilderness to witness the Northern Lights for himself. The young man is filled with a sense of adventure and excitement, eager to experience the beauty of the aurora borealis firsthand. Yet, as he travels deeper into the wilderness, he begins to feel a sense of unease, as if he is being watched by some unseen force.
"Then I looked at the stars, and I knew they were God's, And I felt a strange pain in my breast; But they're ne'er to be won, for we've none of us guns, And they're out of the range of our best. Yet I'm happy enough, and I think I can rough It with those that are clever and brave; And we'll soon be in sight of the Northern Lights, If we march to the Pole like a wave."
Here, Service captures the sense of awe and wonder that the Northern Lights inspire in the human heart. The young man is filled with a sense of reverence for the natural world, recognizing that the stars themselves are a testament to the power and majesty of God. Yet, at the same time, he is filled with a sense of determination and courage, eager to explore the wilderness and discover the secrets of the Northern Lights.
As the young man and his companions press on, they are confronted by a series of challenges and obstacles, from treacherous ice floes to fierce blizzards. Yet, through it all, they remain steadfast in their quest to witness the Northern Lights. And finally, after many long weeks of travel, they arrive at their destination, standing in awe as the shimmering lights dance across the sky.
"Then we saw the Northern Lights, Whipping wildly overhead, And we yelled with all our might, Till the gunners turned in bed. Then we talked of home, and of Christmas-tide, And of those we had left behind; And we spoke of a sweetheart young and fair, That somebody ought to find."
Here, Service captures the sense of joy and wonder that the Northern Lights inspire in the human heart. The young men are filled with a sense of camaraderie and fellowship, united in their awe and wonder at the beauty of the aurora borealis. And even as they talk of home and loved ones, they are reminded of the power and majesty of the natural world, and the sense of wonder and mystery that it inspires.
In conclusion, The Ballad of the Northern Lights is a classic poem that captures the beauty and mystery of the aurora borealis. With its vivid imagery and haunting melody, the poem transports the reader to the frozen wilderness of the North, where the shimmering lights dance across the sky like a celestial ballet. At its core, the poem is a celebration of the natural world and its power to inspire wonder and awe in the human heart. And in a world that often seems cold and indifferent, The Ballad of the Northern Lights is a reminder of the beauty and majesty that surrounds us, if only we have the courage and determination to seek it out.
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