This is a follow up from my previous Post showing the full poem by Robert William Service.
L’Envoi
We talked of yesteryears, of trails and treasure,
Of men who played the game and lost or won;
Of mad stampedes, of toil beyond all measure,
Of camp-fire comfort when the day was done.
We talked of sullen nights by moon-dogs haunted,
Of bird and beast and tree, of rod and gun;
Of boat and tent, of hunting-trip enchanted
Beneath the wonder of the midnight sun;
Of bloody-footed dogs that gnawed the traces,
Of prisoned seas, wind-lashed and winter-locked;
The ice-gray dawn was pale upon our faces,
Yet still we filled the cup and still we talked.
The city street was dimmed. We saw the glitter
Of moon-picked brilliants on the virgin snow,
And down the drifted canyon heard the bitter,
Relentless slogan of the winds of woe.
The city was forgot, and, parka-skirted,
We trod that leagueless land that once we knew;
We saw stream past, down valleys glacier-girted,
The wolf-worn legions of the caribou.
We smoked our pipes, o’er scenes of triumph dwelling;
Of deeds of daring, dire defeats, we talked;
And other tales that lost not in the telling,
Ere to our beds uncertainly we walked.
And so, dear friends, in gentler valleys roaming,
Perhaps, when on my printed page you look,
Your fancies by the firelight may go homing
To that lone land that haply you forsook.
And if perchance you hear the silence calling,
The frozen music of star-yearning heights,
Or, dreaming, see the seines of silver trawling
Across the sky’s abyss on vasty nights,
You may recall that sweep of savage splendor,
That land that measures each man at his worth,
And feel in memory, half fierce, half tender,
The brotherhood of men that know the North.
Robert William Service (1874 - 1958)
from Ballads of a Cheechako (Book 4)
Robert Service was a Canadian explorer who went into the Arctic and the Yukon in particular. Hence the need for Mawson to change North into South in the third stanza.
Here are some details from Wikipedia …
Robert William Service was an English-born Canadian poet and writer, often called “The Bard of the Yukon” and “The Canadian Kipling”.[2] Born in Lancashire of Scottish descent, he was a bank clerk by trade, but spent long periods travelling in the west in the United States and Canada, often in poverty. When his bank sent him to the Yukon, he was inspired by tales of the Klondike Gold Rush, and wrote two poems, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee“, which showed remarkable authenticity from an author with no experience of the gold rush or mining, and enjoyed immediate popularity.
Encouraged by this, he quickly wrote more poems on the same theme, which were published as Songs of a Sourdough (re-titled The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses in the U.S.), and achieved a massive sale. When his next collection, Ballads of a Cheechako, proved equally successful, Service could afford to travel widely and live a leisurely life, basing himself in Paris and the French Riviera.
Partly because of their popularity, and the speed with which he wrote them, his works were dismissed as doggerel by the critics, who tended to say the same of Rudyard Kipling, with whom Service was often compared. This did not worry Service, who was happy to classify his work as “verse, not poetry.”
LÉnvoi – the sending forth
Looking at the poem it is all about comradeship after days of coping with the extreme environment of the Yukon. The lines give reference to treasure and the discovery of gold. Survival as a team working in such arduous conditions is portrayed in the lines. And Mawson could readily relate to these lines on his explorations. And the talk around the campfire at the end of the day and how they coped.
This work will aways remain as a fitting memorial to the life of those early explorers who ventured into the frozen extremes of our world.
There is an exhibition on the Antarctica at the Australian National Museum Canberra until 11 October 2026. I took the following image on a comment on Books and magazines made by Douglas Mawson. The Adélie penguin is a common species of penguin.
… and here is the Macquarie Island Romping Song that the explorers used to sing …
my word in your ear 