PLOUGHMAN OF THE MOON — Robert Service— Dodd, Mead ($3.50).
"I was always in love with rhyme," confesses Robert Service. "If two lines could be made to clink it seemed to go a long way to justify them. . . . Rhyming has my ruin been. With less deftness I might have produced real poetry." Many a middle-aged American would not trade The Shooting of Dan McGrew or The Cremation of Sam McGee for all the "real poetry" in the language. Robert W. Service rarely shows up in the better anthologies or in college English courses.
But in money-talking terms of copies sold, he is a ranking American poet.
Readers of his autobiographical Plough man of the Moon may be surprised to learn that Rhymester Service was once a Scottish bank clerk. Born in Lancashire, England, he was brought up in Scotland by his grandfather and three Bible-addicted spinster aunts.
As a boy, young "Wullie" Service went to work in a bank and began writing verses during office hours. Even then his attitude toward his craft was that of an artisan. His favorite technique was to plot the meter, write down the rhyming words at the end of each line, last of all fill in the lines behind them. In one of his early poems "there was a couplet I liked" : Love's exultant roundelay Issues in a wail of pain.
"In fact I was so tickled with it that, being Scotch, I saved it up and used it on three later occasions. . . ."
"Where Are You Going To?" When he reached 21, Service shipped for Canada to begin his life as a rolling stone. Freedom was his obsession, and in the New World he found plenty of it. One day, in the brawling San Francisco of Barbary Coast days, he stared at his last $10 bill, and asked himself: "Young fellow, where are you going to?"
The answer was the Yukon town of Whitehorse—as a bank clerk once more, but a bank clerk with what he calls an "author complex." In Whitehorse he was not particularly popular. ("I have never been popular. To be popular is to win the applause of people whose esteem is often not worth the winning.") His one social accomplishment was his recitation of Casey at the Bat, Gunga Din, The Face on the Barroom Floor.
One day he decided to compose some thing of his own for use at a church concert. "It was a Saturday night, and from the various bars I heard sounds of revelry.
The line popped into my mind: A bunch of the boys were whooping it up, and it stuck there." That night, in the teller's cage of the bank, Service wrote his famed Shooting of Dan McGrew aided by the bank guard who fired at him, under the impression that he was a burglar.