The Canadian Rudyard Kipling

 A few lines toward the end of this song were introduced to me in a little book of quotes about nature, and it was identified as coming from an inscription on a rock somewhere on the mountain at the northern start of the Appalachian Trail, Mount Katahdin in Maine. I eventually came to discover in a night of googling that it came from a prolific "verse" writer, who was referred to as a Canadian Rudyard Kipling, with good reason. There's similarity both in their style, length and content, not to mention their influence on their branch of literature. As I read the poem below, I felt as if it could easily be a declaration of my own approach to the outdoors. Without further ado, here is

A Rolling Stone

There's sunshine in the heart of me,

My blood sings in the breeze;

The mountains are a part of me,

I'm fellow to the trees.

My golden youth I'm squandering,

Sun-libertine am I;

A-wandering, a-wandering,

Until the day I die.

I was once, I declare, a Stone-Age man,

And I roomed in the cool of a cave;

I have known, I will swear, in a new life-span,

The fret and the sweat of a slave:

For far over all that folks hold worth,

There lives and there leaps in me

A love of the lowly things of earth,

And a passion to be free.

To pitch my tent with no prosy plan,

To range and to change at will;

To mock at the mastership of man,

To seek Adventure's thrill.

Carefree to be, as a bird that sings;

To go my own sweet way;

To reck not at all what may befall,

But to live and to love each day.

To make my body a temple pure

Wherein I dwell serene;

To care for the things that shall endure,

The simple, sweet and clean.

To oust out envy and hate and rage,

To breathe with no alarm;

For Nature shall be my anchorage,

And none shall do me harm.

To shun all lures that debauch the soul,

The orgied rites of the rich;

To eat my crust as a rover must

With the rough-neck down in the ditch.

To trudge by his side whate'er betide;

To share his fire at night;

To call him friend to the long trail-end,

And to read his heart aright.

To scorn all strife, and to view all life

With the curious eyes of a child;

From the plangent sea to the prairie,

From the slum to the heart of the Wild.

From the red-rimmed star to the speck of sand,

From the vast to the greatly small;

For I know that the whole for good is planned,

And I want to see it all.

To see it all, the wide world-way,

From the fig-leaf belt to the Pole;

With never a one to say me nay,

And none to cramp my soul.

In belly-pinch I will pay the price,

But God! let me be free;

For once I know in the long ago,

They made a slave of me.

In a flannel shirt from earth's clean dirt,

Here, pal, is my calloused hand!

Oh, I love each day as a rover may,

Nor seek to understand.

To enjoy is good enough for me;

The gipsy of God am I;

Then here's a hail to each flaring dawn!

And here's a cheer to the night that's gone!

And may I go a-roaming on

Until the day I die!

Then every star shall sing to me

Its song of liberty;

And every morn shall bring to me

Its mandate to be free.

In every throbbing vein of me

I'll feel the vast Earth-call;

O body, heart and brain of me

Praise Him who made it all! 

~ Robert William Service

~ Rak Chazak