Robert W. Service
The Junior God
- The Junior God looked from his place
- In the conning towers of heaven,
- And he saw the world through the span of space
- Like a giant golf-ball driven.
- And because he was bored, as some gods are,
- With high celestial mirth,
- He clutched the reins of a shooting star,
- And he steered it down to earth.
- The Junior God, ‘mid leaf and bud,
- Passed on with a weary air,
- Till lo! he came to a pool of mud,
- And some hogs were rolling there.
- Then in he plunged with gleeful cries,
- And down he lay supine;
- For they had no mud in paradise,
- And they likewise had no swine.
- The Junior God forgot himself;
- He squelched mud through his toes;
- With the careless joy of a wanton boy
- His reckless laughter rose.
- Till, tired at last, in a brook close by,
- He washed off every stain;
- Then softly up to the radiant sky
- He rose, a god again.
- The Junior God now heads the roll
- In the list of heaven’s peers;
- He sits in the House of High Control,
- And he regulates the spheres.
- Yet does he wonder, do you suppose,
- If, even in gods divine,
- The best and wisest may not be those
- Who have wallowed awhile with the swine?
The Argument
- Said Jock McBrown to Tam McSmith,
- “A little bet I’m game to take on,
- That I can scotch this Shakespeare myth
- And prove Will just a stoodge for Bacon.”
- Said Tam McSmith to Jock McBrown,
- “Ye gyke, I canna let ye rave on.
- See here, I put a shilling down:
- My betting’s on the Bard of Avon.”
- Said Jock McBrown to Tam McSmith,
- “Come on, ye’ll pay a braw wee dramlet;
- Bacon’s my bet — the proof herewith…
- He called his greatest hero — HAMlet.”
About the Poet:
Robert W. Service, (1874-1958), was born in Preston, Lancashire, England of Scottish parents. He spent his childhood in Scotland, educated at the University of Glasgow, and emigrated to Canada in 1894.
While working for the Canadian Bank of Commerce he was stationed for eight years in Whitehorse, Yukon. Service was a correspondent for the Toronto Star during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and an ambulance driver and correspondent in France during World War I.
Service settled in France after WWI and returned to Canada during WWII. His vagabond career took him throughout the world, with a diversity of jobs from cook to clerk, from correspondent to hobo. He wrote two autobiographical works, Ploughman of the Moon (1945) and Harper of Heaven (1948) and 6 novels, including The Trail of ’98 (1912) about the Klondike Gold Rush, and more than 45 verse collections containing over 1,000 poems. [DES-6/03]
