A Dialogue on Robert Service's The Lure of Little Voices

This is a teacher-student discussion about a classic poem from Canada.

9:08 AM 5/12/2006

The Lure of Little Voices
by Robert W Service 1874-1958
http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/21325-Robert-W-Service-The-Lure-Of-Little-Voices

Lyndon
Dear Sandal, some pesky questions to begin with. Give me a word that is used unusually and well as a verb. Give me the best metaphor in the poem. Give me a fine line of perfect internal rhyme. What do you think of Service's use of the hackneyed word "awful"? Which line suggests the voices of huskies or wolves? From the wind directions, where do you think that the persona is living, domestically, but not in his heart? Thank you for doing these trite things. Ron.

Reply

Service evokes the northern wilderness with strong imagery and inventive wording.
The stark and sullen solitudes that sentinel the Pole.
uses the noun sentinel unusually as a verb, implying the empty lands guard and watch the top of the world. It is excellent here not only because of its sense, but also because of its meter and alliteration.

The metaphor of Little Voices in all their shapes and actions unifies the poem and explains why only he can hear them. They are his memory of the sounds and beauty of the far north, God's country, the loneliness and emptiness of it.

There are several fine examples of perfect internal rhyme in this poem. Service is well known for excellent rhyming, and often consistent internal rhyming. I love this line for its urgency and poignancy:
My heart is aching, aching, but I hear them, sleeping, waking
The repetition of aching emphasises the pain, and in perfect rhythm, he explains the constancy of the voices with this wonderful rhyme.

The adjective awful has become hackneyed through overuse in the last century. Its derivation is from awe, awe inspiring, and I think Service's use of it is entirely appropriate.
Yes, they're wanting me, they're haunting me, the awful lonely places
The tundra is too huge to comprehend, a vast treeless plain with a sky just as wide. He remembers his experience of unity with the land and the universe, a transcendental knowledge which is absent in the arms of the woman he loves. Although he sincerely loves her and grieves to leave her, his love of the personified awful lonely places is stronger. Service demonstrates for Canada's north the same awe that visitors take from Africa and other wild places of our beautiful world.

In the days before motorized transport, when Service was in the Yukon, native dogs (malamutes) were the beasts of burden. A pack of six to a dozen drew sleds of freight over the snow. In the dark of the arctic winter a man's survival rested upon the health and strength of his dogs, and he protected them like his own children. This history is well described in Jack London's famous book, Call of the Wild.
They're whining and they're whimpering as if each had a soul
compares the metaphor of little voices to his beloved dogs, calling him back.

The narrator of this poem has returned to civilized parts and tried to make a new life, but it is not satisfying his soul.
On the North-wind, on the West-wind, from the peak and from the plain
suggests that he is living south and east of the mountains and plains - Winnipeg, or farther east in the heartland of Canada. This is pure invention, since Service was working as a banker in Whitehorse, Yukon, at the time of writing. The poem was published in 1907 in his first book of poems, Spell of the Yukon, which made Service world famous and a wealthy man. He left the Yukon around 1908 and lived for a while in New York, eventually taking up residence in France.



10:52 PM 5/12/2006

Lyndon replied to your post on The Lure of Little Voices by Robert Service, saying:
Dear Sandal, in what sense is this Ballad a dramatic monologue? Is the poet speaking for himself or another character? Or for both?


Dear Ron, thank you for this question. First I had to find out what is a dramatic monologue.

Dramatic Monologue
a poem in which a single speaker who is not the poet utters the entire poem at a critical moment. The speaker has a listener within the poem, but we too are his/her listener, and we learn about the speaker's character from what the speaker says. In fact, the speaker may reveal unintentionally certain aspects of his/her character. Robert Browning perfected this form. (source: Abrams glossary)

I think The Lure of Little Voices is clearly a dramatic monologue. The narrator addresses himself to his sleeping wife/mistress (she is not defined) to explain why he is about to leave without saying goodbye. He tells us about his obsession with and urge to return to the northlands.

The underlying question is whether Service was putting himself in that situation or speaking for another man?

As I mentioned yesterday, the narrator is not Service himself, that is, it is not a true story. I do not have many details about Service's personal life, except that he was an Englishman working as a banker in Whitehorse, Yukon. Service was sent by his bank to Whitehorse around 1900-05. After he left the Yukon in 1908 he never returned, and he eventually married a Frenchwoman, Germaine Bougeoin.

Whether he wrote the story of one of the tens of thousands of men who rushed to find gold in the Yukon from 1898 to 1910 is open to debate. His other poems show he had a taste for tall stories, and the Wikipedia biography relates that when he lived in Paris, he had a habit of dressing like the local workmen to observe life in the streets unnoticed. I am sure that men did leave women behind for the love of adventure and the wild lands, and such stories could well be told over a pint of beer.

Quite aside from the identity of the narrator, this poem is a beautiful expression of the love of land and life beyond civilization. He knows that he cannot have both this woman, and the God he finds out there. Service may have expressed this sincerely at the time. I find this a most poignant love triangle.