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
by Robert W. Service