The Prospector

Robert W. Service

I strolled up old Bonanza, where I staked in ninety-eight,

A-purpose to revisit the old claim.

I kept thinking mighty sadly of the funny ways of Fate,

And the lads who once were with me in the game.

Poor boys, they’re down-and-outers, and there’s scarcely one to-day

Can show a dozen colors in his poke;

And me, I’m still prospecting, old and battered, gaunt and gray,

And I’m looking for a grub-stake, and I’m broke.

I strolled up old Bonanza. The same old moon looked down;

The same old landmarks seemed to yearn to me;

But the cabins all were silent, and the flat, once like a town,

Was mighty still and lonesome-like to see.

There were piles and piles of tailings where we toiled with pick and pan,

And turning round a bend I heard a roar,

And there a giant gold-ship of the very newest plan

Was tearing chunks of pay-dirt from the shore.

It wallowed in its water-bed; it burrowed, heaved and swung;

It gnawed its way ahead with grunts and sighs;

Its bill of fare was rock and sand; the tailings were its dung;

It glared around with fierce electric eyes.

Full fifty buckets crammed its maw; it bellowed out for more;

It looked like some great monster in the gloom.

With two to feed its sateless greed, it worked for seven score,

And I sighed: “Ah, old-time miner, here’s your doom!”

The idle windlass turns to rust; the sagging sluice-box falls;

The holes you digged are water to the brim;

Your little sod-roofed cabins with the snugly moss-chinked walls

Are deathly now and mouldering and dim.

The battle-field is silent where of old you fought it out;

The claims you fiercely won are lost and sold.

But there’s a little army that they’ll never put to rout —

The men who simply live to seek the gold.

The men who can’t remember when they learned to swing a pack,

Or in what lawless land the quest began;

The solitary seeker with his grub-stake on his back,

The restless buccaneer of pick and pan.

On the mesas of the Southland, on the tundras of the North,

You will find us, changed in face but still the same;

And it isn’t need, it isn’t greed that sends us faring forth —

It’s the fever, it’s the glory of the game.

For once you’ve panned the speckled sand and seen the bonny dust,

Its peerless brightness blinds you like a spell;

It’s little else you care about; you go because you must,

And you feel that you could follow it to hell.

You’d follow it in hunger, and you’d follow it in cold;

You’d follow it in solitude and pain;

And when you’re stiff and battened down let someone whisper “Gold,”

You’re lief to rise and follow it again.

Yet look you, if I find the stuff it’s just like so much dirt;

I fling it to the four winds like a child.

It’s wine and painted women and the things that do me hurt,

Till I crawl back, beggared, broken, to the Wild.

Till I crawl back, sapped and sodden, to my grub-stake and my tent —

There’s a city, there’s an army (hear them shout).

There’s the gold in millions, millions, but I haven’t got a cent;

And oh, it’s me, it’s me that found it out.

It was my dream that made it good, my dream that made me go

To lands of dread and death disprized of man;

But oh, I’ve known a glory that their hearts will never know,

When I picked the first big nugget from my pan.

It’s still my dream, my dauntless dream, that drives me forth once more

To seek and starve and suffer in the Vast;

That heaps my heart with eager hope, that glimmers on before —

My dream that will uplift me to the last.

Perhaps I am stark crazy, but there’s none of you too sane;

It’s just a little matter of degree.

My hobby is to hunt out gold; it’s fortressed in my brain;

It’s life and love and wife and home to me.

And I’ll strike it, yes, I’ll strike it; I’ve a hunch I cannot fail;

I’ve a vision, I’ve a prompting, I’ve a call;

I hear the hoarse stampeding of an army on my trail,

To the last, the greatest gold camp of them all.

Beyond the shark-tooth ranges sawing savage at the sky

There’s a lowering land no white man ever struck;

There’s gold, there’s gold in millions, and I’ll find it if I die.

And I’m going there once more to try my luck.

Maybe I’ll fail — what matter? It’s a mandate, it’s a vow;

And when in lands of dreariness and dread

You seek the last lone frontier, far beyond your frontiers now,

You will find the old prospector, silent, dead.

You will find a tattered tent-pole with a ragged robe below it;

You will find a rusted gold-pan on the sod;

You will find the claim I’m seeking, with my bones as stakes to show it;

But I’ve sought the last Recorder, and He’s — God.

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Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love

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Chicago Poem by Lew Welch

I lived here nearly 5 years before I could
meet the middle western day with anything approaching
Dignity. It’s a place that lets you
understand why the Bible is the way it is:
Proud people cannot live here.

The land’s too flat. Ugly sullen and big it
pounds men down past humbleness. They
Stoop at 35 possibly cringing from the heavy and

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Madeleine in Church by Charlotte Mew

Here, in the darkness, where this plaster saint
Stands nearer than God stands to our distress,
And one small candle shines, but not so faint
As the far lights of everlastingness,
I’d rather kneel than over there, in open day
Where Christ is hanging, rather pray
To something more like my own clay,
Not too divine;

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The Death of the Hired Man by Robert Frost

Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage
To meet him in the doorway with the news
And put him on his guard. ‘Silas is back.’
She pushed him outward with her through the door
And shut it after her. ‘Be kind,’ she said.
She took the market things from Warren’s arms
And set them on the porch, then drew him down
To sit beside her on the wooden steps.

‘When was I ever anything but kind to him?
But I’ll not have the fellow back,’ he said.
‘I told him so last haying, didn’t I?
If he left then, I said, that ended it.

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Andrea del Sarto by Robert Browning

But do not let us quarrel any more,
No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once:
Sit down and all shall happen as you wish.
You turn your face, but does it bring your heart?
I'll work then for your friend's friend, never fear,
Treat his own subject after his own way,
Fix his own time, accept too his own price,
And shut the money into this small hand
When next it takes mine. Will it? tenderly?
Oh, I'll content him,—but to-morrow, Love!
I often am much wearier than you think,
This evening more than usual, and it seems
As if—forgive now—should you let me sit
Here by the window with your hand in mine
And look a half-hour forth on Fiesole,

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110

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Ben Jonson Entertains a Man from Stratford by Edwin Arlington Robinson

You are a friend then, as I make it out,
Of our man Shakespeare, who alone of us
Will put an ass's head in Fairyland
As he would add a shilling to more shillings,
All most harmonious, — and out of his
Miraculous inviolable increase
Fills Ilion, Rome, or any town you like
Of olden time with timeless Englishmen;
And I must wonder what you think of him —
All you down there where your small Avon flows
By Stratford, and where you're an Alderman.
Some, for a guess, would have him riding back
To be a farrier there, or say a dyer;
Or maybe one of your adept surveyors;
Or like enough the wizard of all tanners.

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Heart’s Needle by W. D. Snodgrass

For Cynthia

When he would not return to fine garments and good food, to his houses and his people, Loingseachan told him, “Your father is dead.” “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said. “Your mother is dead,” said the lad. “All pity for me has gone out of the world.” “Your sister, too, is dead.” “The mild sun rests on every ditch,” he said; “a sister loves even though not loved.” “Suibhne, your daughter is dead.” “And an only daughter is the needle of the heart.” “And Suibhne, your little boy, who used to call you “Daddy”—he is dead.” “Aye,” said Suibhne, “that’s the drop that brings a man to the ground.”
He fell out of the yew tree; Loingseachan closed his arms around him and placed him in manacles.—AFTER THE MIDDLE-IRISH ROMANCE, THE MADNESS OF SUIBHNE

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111

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The Shooting of Dan McGrew by Robert W. Service

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.

When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.

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The Spell of the Yukon by Robert W. Service

I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it—
Came out with a fortune last fall,—
Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn’t all.

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