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I’m Scared of It All

I’m scared of it all, God’s truth! so I am

It’s too big and brutal for me.

My nerve’s on the raw and I don’t give a damn

For all the “hoorah” that I see.

I’m pinned between subway and overhead train,

Where automobillies sweep down:

Oh, I want to go back to the timber again …

I’m scared of the terrible town.

I want to go back to my lean, ashen plains;

My rivers that flash into foam;

My ultimate valleys where solitude reigns;

My trail from Fort Churchill to Nome.

My forests packed full of mysterious gloom,

My ice fields agrind and aglare:

The city is deadfalled with danger and doom …

I know that I’m safer up there.

I watch the wan faces that flash in the street;

All kinds and all classes I see.

Yet never a one in the million I meet,

Has the smile of a comrade to me.

Just jaded and panting like dogs in a pack;

Just tensed and intent on the goal:

O God! but I’m lonesome … I wish I was back,

Up there in the land of the Pole.

I feel it’s all wrong, but I can’t tell you why …

The palace, the hovel next door;

The insolent towers that sprawl to the sky,

The crush and the rush and the roar.

I’m trapped like a fox and I fear for my pelt;

I cower in the crash and the glare;

Oh, I want to be back in the avalanche belt,

For I know that it’s safer up there!

I’m scared of it all: Oh, afar I can hear

The voice of the solitudes call!

We’re nothing but brute with a little veneer,

And nature is best after all.

There’s tumult and terror abroad in the street;

There’s menace and doom in the air;

I’ve got to get back to my thousand mile beat;

The trail where the cougar and silvertip meet;

The snows and the campfire, with wolves at my feet …

Goodbye, for it’s safer up there.

From “Rhymes of a Rolling Stone,” by Robert W. Service.

Reprinted by permission of Dodd Mead and Company,

from the collected poems of Robert Service.