The Junior God



The Junior God looked from his place
     In the conning towers of heaven,
And he saw the world through the span of space
     Like a giant golf-ball driven.
And because he was bored, as some gods are,
     With high celestial mirth,
He clutched the reins of a shooting star,
     And he steered it down to earth.

The Junior God, 'mid leaf and bud,
     Passed on with a weary air,
Till lo! he came to a pool of mud,
     And some hogs were rolling there.
Then in he plunged with gleeful cries,
     And down he lay supine;
For they had no mud in paradise,
     And they likewise had no swine.

The Junior God forgot himself;
     He squelched mud through his toes;
With the careless joy of a wanton boy
     His reckless laughter rose.
Till, tired at last, in a brook close by,
     He washed off every stain;
Then softly up to the radiant sky
     He rose, a god again.

The Junior God now heads the roll
     In the list of heaven's peers;
He sits in the House of High Control,
     And he regulates the spheres.
Yet does he wonder, do you suppose,
     If, even in gods divine,
The best and wisest may not be those
     Who have wallowed awhile with the swine?

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 03, 2023

1:04 min read
123

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABABCDCD EFEFXGXG XHXHIXIX JKJKHGHG
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 1,139
Words 213
Stanzas 4
Stanza Lengths 8, 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…

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