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Home  »  Respectfully Quoted  »  Robert William Service (1874–1958)

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.

 
NUMBER: 33
AUTHOR: Robert William Service (1874–1958)
QUOTATION: 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.

No! There’s the land. (Have you seen it?)
It’s the cussedest land that I know,
From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it
To the deep, deathlike valleys below.
Some say God was tired when He made it;
Some say it’s a fine land to shun;
Maybe; but there’s some as would trade it
For no land on earth—and I’m one.
ATTRIBUTION: ROBERT W. SERVICE, “The Spell of the Yukon,” stanzas 1 and 2, The Spell of the Yukon, p. 15 (1961).
SUBJECTS: Alaska