It was not for the Arctic gold and a claim at the end of the great white trail;
Nor yet for the Arctic lore — for a map of the floe and a graph of the gale:
But the quest came out of a primitive urge in the blood of our common birth —
The lure of the last lone verge and the desert end of the rolling earth.
For this he abandoned the green of the world — the lakes and the hills and the leas,
And rivers of midsummer nations, and banks with the corn and the vine and the trees,
And the genial zones of the planet’s rains, and the belt of the planet’s flowers;
For this he abandoned all cities — their households, their singing and sunsets and towers.
Onward, north of the Northern Lights, hungry and cold and alone,
Eternity under his frozen feet and the snows of the ages unknown,
With never the boom of the purple seas, nor ever a mountain of fire,
North of the Plain of the thousand slain — who were dead of the same desire! —
Till the East and West were lost in the South, and the North was no more, and he stood
Face to face with the ancient dream through his hope and his hardihood;
And the alien skies where the polar sun went round the horizon’s rim
And the nameless ice below belonged at last to the race through him.
—————
The End
And that’s the End of the Poem
© Poetry Monster, 2021.
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Poetry Monster — the multilingual library of poetic works. Here you’ll find original poems, poetry translations, ancient verses, ballads and even folk tales.
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Some external links: The Bat’s Poetry Cave. — Fledermaus’s poetry site. Talking Writing Monster. — the irreverent and irrelevant chatter on subjects both serious and not quite. A free for all board. You can scribble anything on it without registration (but it doesn’t let spammers in). You can even post your poems. Qwant.com. — a search engine from France. It’s an alternative because there are a few alternatives, like Bing, Duckduckgo, and Ecosia. And there is Yandex, the ultimate language-oriented search engine for the Russophone world. Commercial Links: Russian Commerce – the foreign trade assistance agency Other links: Poems and poetry in Russian (if you are reading this in English, as you obviously are, then you’d have to switch the language, the language switch is on the menu. More on languages)
