Robert Service's "The Passing of the Year"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 2 January 2025

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

Does today’s poem contain the secret to minimizing regret in 2025? Kinda, sorta. Happy reading.

In his youth, Robert Service worked in a shipping office and a bank, and briefly studied literature at the University of Glasgow. Inspired by Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, Service sailed to western Canada in 1894 to become a cowboy in the Yukon Wilderness. He worked on a ranch and as a bank teller in Vancouver Island six years after the Gold Rush, gleaning material that would inform his poetry for years to come and earn him his reputation as “Bard of the Yukon.” Service traveled widely throughout his life—to Hollywood, Cuba, Alberta, Paris, Louisiana, and elsewhere—and his travels continued to fuel his writing.A prolific writer and poet, Service published numerous collections of poetry during his lifetime, including Songs of a Sourdough or Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses (1907), which went into ten printings its first year, Ballad of a Cheechako (1909) and Ballads of a Bohemian (1921), as well as two autobiographies and six novels. Several of his novels were made into films, and he also appeared as an actor in The Spoilers, a 1942 film with Marlene Dietrich.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:07.9	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, January 2nd, 2025.
0:13.9	Today's poem is by Robert W. Service, and it's called The Passing of the Year.
0:28.0	Robert's Service was born in 1874 in England, but only a few years later, his family moved to Glasgow, Scotland, where he spent the rest of his youth in early adulthood.
0:33.2	Service was always of the manly, rough-and- tumble sort. While attending the University of Glasgow,
0:40.3	as a young man, he wrote a paper about Hamlet that one of his professors rejected utterly and called obscene.
0:47.3	We met with this response. Service challenged the professor to a fistfight outside the classroom. The professor declined,
0:56.0	and Robert Service shortly thereafter left the university for good. He eventually moved to
1:03.0	Canada, where he worked on farms, ranches, etc., and eventually earned the title, Poet of the Yukon.
1:10.0	And though the tone of today's poem
1:12.3	is a little more refined, I think some of that fighting spirit comes through, because I think
1:17.1	effectively what we have in this poem, the passing of the year, is a meditation upon fortune,
1:23.6	lady fortune, and the ways that one does or does not, can, or cannot contend with her.
1:30.2	There are those who receive good fortune, and they are pleased.
1:37.4	They haven't contended.
1:39.3	They have simply gotten lucky.
1:42.4	Then there are those who receive bad fortune and are disappointed or grieved, and they haven't necessarily contended either. They have just been unlucky. And then finally we have the speaker of the poem, who I think is the only one who can say that he has really wrestled with fortune, at least in a successful way.
2:03.3	And his response is not joy at his good luck or grief over his bad luck, but rather a kind of equanimity.
2:14.1	As Hamlet, Prince of Denmark says, quoting the late antique philosopher Boethius,
2:20.1	all luck is good luck to those who can bear it with equanimity.
2:24.6	And I think this poem offers one thought more,
2:29.0	that those who can bear both the good and the bad with equanimity
	...

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