framlingem

When I went to China in April 2000 (wow - I didn't realise how long it's been), some very good friends gave me a book of poems by Robert Service; a piece of Canada to take with me, they said, written by someone with as much wanderlust and love for wild places as I had. I'd loved the Robert Service poems I'd read previously ("The Cremation of Sam McGee" is probably the one that most of you have read, and oh, what a spooky tale THAT was. Strange things done by the midnight sun, indeed.), but this was the first time I'd read "The Men That Don't Fit In". Being, if not a man, at least someone who didn't fit in, someone who had mad passions of starting things and never finishing them, someone with incredibly itchy feet, it spoke to me. "If they just went straight they might go far" was pretty much the refrain of every parent-teacher meeting I sat through while staring in the direction of my feet. (Or at least, "Emily has so much potential! She could do so well if she'd just apply herself." Which is the same thing. And I WAS applying myself - just not to schoolwork. *grin*)

I find this poem is even more relevant to me now, as the second two stanzas start to come into focus - but I don't WANT to plod, and I don't know how to be steady, and while I'm quiet in many ways, I could never be quiet in the way the poem means, in the head-down way, if I tried.

When I was being the Mysterious Poetry Woman for

kyra_ojosverdes, this is one of the poems I read to her. Not because it has any meaning for her that I ascribe (though if she found some, that's wonderful), but because I love the music in Service's writing - everything just works, and there's no possible way the words chosen could ever be anything but what they are; the man is a master of rythm and rhyme. He'd make a fantastic rapper if he wasn't dead. (Though that doesn't seem to be stopping TuPac.)

I'm rather glad he's not a rapper, though. I hope I did him justice.