Were You Ever Out In The Great Alone

One of the "What happened on this date?" sites I read each day had the notice that January 16 is the birthday of English-born Canadian poet Robert Service. (1874-1958) The name didn't spark any recognition for me, but I liked this stanza given from one of his poems:

Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,

And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;

With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,

A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;

While high overhead green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars? --

Then you've a hunch what the music meant ... hunger and night and the stars.

The short blurb said it was from the poem "The Shooting of Dan McGrew". Now that did sound familiar. I found and read the entire poem then tried to remember what memory bank I had left it in. Was it something my grade school teacher read to us? Or one of my highschool English teachers? No clue. I might call my older brother to see if he remembers anything about it. It does seem the kind of poem he would/could quote from and our country school teacher did often read to us.

I read more about Robert Service and a few more of his poems. Most are written in a narrative style and while he was financially successful with his writing, critics did not consider his works as serious poems. 

The poem also brought to mind the 1960 hit song, North To Alaska, by Johnny Horton.