Book Borrower

Robert William Service 1874 – 1958



I am a mild man, you'll agree,
        But red my rage is,
When folks who borrow books from me
        Turn down their pages.

Or when a chap a book I lend,
        And find he's loaned it
Without permission to a friend -
        As if he owned it.

But worst of all I hate those crooks
        (May hell-fires burn them!)
Who beg the loan of cherished books
        And don't return them.

My books are tendrils of myself
        No shears can sever . . .
May he who rapes one from its shelf
        Be damned forever.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

29 sec read
68

Quick analysis:

Scheme AXAX BCBC DEDE FGFG
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 509
Words 94
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4

Robert William Service

Robert William Service was a poet and writer sometimes referred to as the Bard of the Yukon He is best-known for his writings on the Canadian North including the poems The Shooting of Dan McGrew The Law of the Yukon and The Cremation of Sam McGee His writing was so expressive that his readers took him for a hard-bitten old Klondike prospector not the later-arriving bank clerk he actually was Robert William Service was born 16 January 1874 in Preston England but also lived in Scotland before emigrating to Canada in 1894 Service went to the Yukon Territory in 1904 as a bank clerk and became famous for his poems about this region which are mostly in his first two books of poetry He wrote quite a bit of prose as well and worked as a reporter for some time but those writings are not nearly as well known as his poems He travelled around the world quite a bit and narrowly escaped from France at the beginning of the Second World War during which time he lived in Hollywood California He died 11 September 1958 in France Incidentally he played himself in a movie called The Spoilers starring John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich more…

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