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WHEN THE TOILER'S DAY IS DONE

A PERSONAL FAVORITE OF MINE; WILL IT BE ONE OF YOURS?

 

WHEN THE TOILER'S DAY IS DONE

 

 

 

Oh when the long workdays are over, and the Big Boss gives me my pay,

I hope it wont be hell-fire, as oft the parsons say,

I hope I won't rot in purgatory

      But bask by your throne of glory.

 

Look at my face, dust soiled, sun dried; look at my calloused hands;

The marks of a man who wore a yoke, and made a stand.

A foot soldier who fought in a foreign war for God and country,

Killing the heathen Buddhists, to keep my country free.

I've worked for greedy bastards, big-bellied, proud, and rich;

I've done their desire for a daily hire, and I died like a dog in the ditch. 

          I've used the strength Thou's given me, from toil I did not shirk,

   For threescore years I labored--on Sunday I did not work.

And now, with age I am broken and bent, twisted and scared;

Then into the street like a rag, discarded.

Oh lord, I know my sins are many, for oft I've played the fool:

Women, whiskey, and cards, they made me the devils tool;

Feasting a fawning parasite, or glutting a harlot's purse,

And out with the guys blottoed, that was my stupid curse.

 

Then back with an axe to the woods, broke to the mines or mills;

Down in the damp cold muck, hung over, alone with the chills.

I drilled at the hard coal-face, I dug in the three-foot seam,

Been pinned by a ceiling rock, while hearing my buddies scream,

In summers I've felled Your pines, and pit mined in North Saskatchewan,

My winters spent hughing in the mines of Flin Flon,

 

I hurled Your forests down, polluted with ore tailings Your streams--

I made material wealth for others to live their dreams--

   Cutting your virgin forests, leaving the ground stripped bare,

And bulldozing away hillsides, to get at metals rare,

Blasting the rocks to the ore-bed, and laying roads through glens:

A dumb beast of burden, a tool for the greed of some men.

Who lived without running water, in a squalid company sty.

      I, the primitive toiler, was doomed to work till I die,

 

No sense to save my wages, no brainier than a kid:

A man who could barely read, doing his masters bid.

   God, if I didn't do the job, another would take my place;

   Better to toil and pay my way, then live under a bridge in disgrace.

This world of mine has forces, forces greater than mine;

But I always carried Your book, but rarely had the time.

 

   I prayed for a Christian woman, and the caress of a loving wife,

   But they're none in the camps up north; a lonely and loveless life--

A brute, who was yoked to labor, ladies were too far above.

All I knew were sluts, thus I longed for love. 

   Though raised as a guttersnipe, I would have been mannered and mild

   If fate had given a wife to treasure, and smiles and hugs of a child--

But I came from an ill-mannered lot, not from a family grand.

Lord, I filled my earthly duties, toiled in Thy northern lands;

  I have neither abused nor cheated others; I've done my bloody best.

   My long, long shift is over, so have I passed Your test?

 

Based on The Song of the Wage Slave, in Call of the Yukon, Robert W. Service.  Service, a World War I Canadian veteran who went from drifter to the most read poet of the 20th century, a peoples poet.  His version was one of the poorest in that slim volume; and like mine, many of his lines didnt scan well.  Service simply failed to develop the topic, though he has a developed social conscience; I filled this elision.  There is little left of Services poem other than form. 

 

Country Joe Mc Donald (Country Joe & the Fish) set a collection of his antiwar poems to music in the 70s.  Call of the Yukon, still in print, is his most entertaining collection.  A couple of those poems are in nearly all high school literature books. 

 

I have read his entire collected works in print. 

 

 

 

 

ROBERT  W.  SERVICE

 

born Jan. 16, 1874, Preston, Lancashire, Eng.
died Sept. 11, 1958, Lancieux, France

in full Robert William Service
popular verse writer called the Canadian Kipling for rollicking ballads of the frozen North, notably The Shooting of Dan McGrew.

Service emigrated to Canada in 1894 and, while working for the Canadian Bank of Commerce in Victoria, B.C., was stationed for eight years in the Yukon. He was a newspaper correspondent for the Toronto Star during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and an ambulance driver and correspondent during World War I.

Service's first verse collections, Songs of a Sourdough (1907) and Ballads of a Cheechako (1909), describing life in the Canadian north, were enormously popular. Among his later volumes of verse are Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (1916) and Bar Room Ballads (1940). The Trail of '98 (1910) is a vivid novel of men and conditions in the Klondike. He also wrote two autobiographical works, Ploughman of the Moon (1945) and Harper of Heaven (1948). From 1912 he lived in Europe, mainly on the French Riviera.

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