By Barry Schatz
Being one that likes to travel, David Bargeron of Herron Michigan was crossing The High Plains of Texas a few years back. It was late at night when he heard a poem on the radio titled, The Men Who Don't Fit In. He was so moved by the poem that when he returned home, he visited the Alpena Library and searched the internet for the poem. To his disappointment, he didn't find it.
On a future adventure, David visited the New Presque Isle Lighthouse in N.E. Michigan. He was enjoying the warm summer evening on the porch swing of the 1905 house when a woman sat down beside him. They struck up a conversation and she turned out to be a school teacher from Pennsylvania. When she said she taught computers, David told her about his attempt at finding poem he had heard in Texas. She asked for his address and he wrote it down on a matchbook cover. A week later, David received a copy of the poem by Robert W. Service. His new friend had found it on the internet and sent him a copy. The following is the poem.
The Men that Don't Fit In
by: Robert W. Service |
| |
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. |