The Spell of the Yukon

Robert Service wrote in the golden years of the Klondike -- of the rough and ready men, and women just as tough. No-one in Robert's world (real or imagined) minced words or had any self-consciousness about them. It was live and let live and sometimes kill or be killed. Reading his poems transports us back to that frozen place in nature when it was literally every man and every woman for him/herself, yet Robert conveys to us not only a sensitivity (in his poem extolling the simple light switch -- something quite novel in those times, especially in the Klondike), but the beauties he saw in the others -- gathered around the village's first "grammyphone," hearing the voice of "canned man" coming from it -- some savages taking to their canoes because it seems demonic, yet others equally savage, enraptured by this miracle of sound. Robert Service touches the heart and soul of the rough and raw Klondike in the early 1900's, and shows us the soul's emotions and colors from inky black to pure gold.