Poety Portfolio
Sino-Canada High School English 12 Diana Wang Yaxian
Make connections with colorful lives
Especially impressive fragments
May blur the line of sight
Organize the scenes like a film
Record all the beautiful moments
Yesterday once more
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.
The Men That Don't Fit In
by Robert William Service
Biography
Robert William Service was a British-Canadian poet and writer that was born in 1874 in Preston, Lancashire. When he was 15 years, he followed his father that worked for the banking business. In 1896, he emigrated to Canada for realizing his cowboy dream. However, he found the difference between the ideal and reality of his expectations. Thus, 18 months later, he set off for California. Although he left in 1958, he always had a variety of dreams and wrote many poems in his whole life. For example, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee” are two of his famous poems. In 1908, he put most of his poems in Songs of a Sourdough, which reside as The Spell of the Yukon. Robert William Service has often been called “the Bard of the Yukon.”
Analysis
The poem, “The Men that Don’t Fit In,” is a poem that is written by Robert William Service. It demonstrates a man who does not have a clear goal in his lives. It is interesting to recognize that the first two stanzas of this poem use “they” as its subject and then in the last two stanzas, the poet use “he” as individuals. “Don’t fit in (line 1)” explains that there is a huge difference between the expectations and the real society of a man such as finding a job for his own value. The poem has a rhyme scheme with ABABCDCD EFEGHIHI JKJKLMLM NOPOQARA that is catchy to read this poem. In addition, the tone of this poem, “The Men that Don’t Fit In,” is regretful and nostaglic for youth. The man in this poem “has failed (line 25)” and “missed his chance (line 25)” illustrates that he did not achieve all his dream and forgets all about his ambitions. In brief, I choose this poem because it reveals the current social situation that a lot of people are not satisfied with their lives and feel that life is not worth living.