2024 read #145: Songs of a Sourdough by Robert W. Service.

Songs of a Sourdough by Robert W. Service

99 pages

Published 1907

Read November 30

Rating: 1ish out of 5

Maybe I first heard of Robert Service through a stray reference in a Robert Macfarlane book, or maybe “Service poem” cropped up somewhere as a shorthand for manly-man-in-the-manly-wild poetry. Either way, I found a pdf of this book under its American title, The Spell of the Yukon. Now, I haven’t read much old poetry, and almost none written before 1970. (When you reach the era of obligatory rhyme, it all gets a bit musty.) But I want to change that, so here we are.

Some of the poems are almost okay, especially in the early pages. I can put myself in a mindset to appreciate what its original audience found in it, even if, for me, it reads like a calculated grind of commercial exotica, peppered with clichés, exemplified by the opening of “The Heart of the Sourdough”:

There where the mighty mountains bare their fangs unto the moon. 

There where the sullen sun-dogs glare in the snow-bright, bitter noon,

And the glacier-glutted streams sweep down at the clarion call of June.

If I thought I could escape with nothing worse than some over-wrought description, alas, I was wrong. “The Law of the Yukon” is multiple pages of Social Darwinism, with the land, personified, ranting about how virile men are awesome and should rule, and how much the “enervated” urban poor suck and should die. That poem singlehandedly brought down my opinion of this book from bemused indifference to active dislike. Subsequent poems extolling Empire and the glory of colonial warfare and the like served only to reinforce this.