Remembered as “the Bard of the Yukon,” Robert W. Service (1874–1958) was born in England but emigrated to Canada at the age of twenty-one with a suit of Western clothing and vague ideas of becoming a cowboy. His chief firsthand experience of Yukon life was as a bank clerk in the town of Whitehorse, where he made himself popular by reciting such standards of the day as “Gunga Din”  and “Casey at the Bat” at town socials. Already writing verses, and with the cadences of Kipling thrumming in his head, he began to turn gold-miners’ yarns, as well as his own observations of local characters and happenings, into poems, most famously “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” Unlike these poems, which raise the barroom tale to the level of comic myth, today’s Poem of the Day, “The Men That Don’t Fit In,” might be read not only as the poet’s paean to the archetypal rambling cowboy but as a lament for himself, who was never one of them — and, by the time of writing the 1911 poem, could never become one, with the frontier closing across western Canada and the United States. Even the poem’s formal accomplishment, with tight common-meter octets and accurate abab rhymes, identifies it as about the cowboy’s world, but not of it. With Robert Service’s western verse, we begin to enter the second stage of Cowboy Poetry: the early 20th-century nostalgia for a world slipped away.

The Men That Don’t Fit In
by Robert W. Service

There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
    A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
    And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
    And they climb the mountain’s crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
    And they don’t know how to rest.

If they just went straight they might go far;
    They are strong and brave and true;
But they’re always tired of the things that are,
    And they want the strange and new.
They say: “Could I find my proper groove,
    What a deep mark I would make!”
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
    Is only a fresh mistake. 

And each forgets, as he strips and runs
    With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones
    Who win in the lifelong race.
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
    Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that’s dead,
    In the glare of the truth at last. 

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
    He has just done things by half.
Life’s been a jolly good joke on him,
    And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
    He was never meant to win;
He’s a rolling stone, and it’s bred in the bone;
    He’s a man who won’t fit in.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.