That is an impressive characteristic example of the technique of vividness, by the Canadian master of them all. But let no one call it poetry. Service’s astounding vogue for six years—it is now vanished—was not due to the _poetry_ in his verse, but to the arresting or violent _drama_ and _melodrama_ in it, made more arresting or compelling by the infectious swing or lilt of the anapaestic rhythm. This rhythm is his only _forte_ in verbal music, though he also employs alliteration successfully. This _forte_ is seen to be a limitation and a weakness, as it also was and is in his alleged artistic foster-father, Rudyard Kipling. For as soon as Service attempts to employ another rhythm better suited to higher thought than the picaresque matter of strictly ‘Sourdough’ Songs, the results are disastrous. He fails to hold the attention; and, inasmuch as there are no compensating rhythmic values, all that is left is the strained and bizarre effect of cheap melodrama. A singular example of this kind of weakness and failure in Service is his _My Madonna_, in which he aims consciously and seriously to achieve a _tour de force_ in religious sentiment, but falls into flat _bathos_ of melodrama (_Songs of a Sourdough_). If proof is wanted that the recipe for writing Vaudeville verse is simply to lilt in anapaestic metre and rhythm the melodrama of the Far West _chevalerie_, proof and illustration are furnished by a stanza from _Sergeant Blue_ by Robert Stead (_Kitchener and Other Poems_, 1917):— Sergeant Blue of the Mounted Police was a so-so kind of a guy; He swore a bit, and he lied a bit, and he boozed a bit on the sly; But he held the post at Snake Creek Bend for country and home and God, And he cured the first and forgot the rest—which wasn’t the least bit odd. The amazing and pathetic fact about Robert Service is that he really possessed authentic poetic genius, and sometimes did write pure poetry. At his best Stead has written some satisfying _genre_ poetry and story-telling ballads. But Stead could not rise beyond the homely-pathetic and the melodramatic in Western _chevalerie_ into the realm of pure poetry. He kept always to the level of his lowly subject. Service, however, fell or rose to the level of his subject. In short, while most of Service’s verse is popular Vaudeville, considerable of it violent melodrama, and much of it drama simply, some of his verse is genuinely poetical, charged with pure beauty and poetic significance. How nobly Service has conceived, how passionately expressed in lovely color-images and pervasive vowel and alliterative music, and how philosophically interpreted Nature in his poem _The Mountain and the Lake_:—