Farewell To Verse



In youth when oft my muse was dumb,
          My fancy nighly dead,
To make my inspiration come
          I stood upon my head;
And thus I let the blood down flow
          Into my cerebellum,
And published every Spring or so
          Slim tomes in vellum.

Alas! I am rheumatic now,
          Grey is my crown;
I can no more with brooding brow
          Stand upside-down.
I fear I might in such a pose
          Burst brain blood-vessel;
And that would be a woeful close
          To my rhyme wrestle.

If to write verse I must reverse
          I fear I'm stymied;
In ink of prose I must immerse
          A pen de-rhymèd.
No more to spank the lyric lyre
          Like Keats or Browning,
May I inspire the Sacred Fire
          My Upside-downing.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on March 05, 2023

37 sec read
127

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABABCACA DEDEXFXF GXGXXHXH
Closest metre Iambic trimeter
Characters 735
Words 125
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 8, 8, 8

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…

All Robert William Service poems | Robert William Service Books

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