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| HAVE you gazed on naked grandeur, where there ’s nothing else to gaze on, | |
| Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore, | |
| Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon, | |
| Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar? | |
| Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking through it, | 5 |
| Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost? | |
| Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God’s sake go and do it; | |
| Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost. | |
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| Have you wandered in the wilderness, the sage-brush desolation, | |
| The bunch-grass levels where the cattle graze? | 10 |
| Have you whistled bits of rag-time at the end of all creation, | |
| And learned to know the desert’s little ways? | |
| Have you camped upon the foothills, have you galloped o’er the ranges, | |
| Have you roamed the arid sun-lands through and through? | |
| Have you chummed up with the mesa? Do you know its moods and changes? | 15 |
| Then listen to the wild,—it ’s calling you. | |
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| Have you known the Great White Silence, not a snow-gemmed twig a-quiver? | |
| (Eternal truths that shame our soothing lies.) | |
| Have you broken trail on snowshoes? mushed your Huskies up the river, | |
| Dared the unknown, led the way, and clutched the prize? | 20 |
| Have you marked the map’s void spaces, mingled with the mongrel races, | |
| Felt the savage strength of brute in every thew? | |
| And though grim as hell the worst is, can you round it off with curses? | |
| Then hearken to the wild,—it ’s wanting you. | |
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| Have you suffered, starved, and triumphed, grovelled down, yet grasped at glory, | 25 |
| Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole? | |
| ‘Done things’ just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story, | |
| Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul? | |
| Have you seen God in His splendours, heard the text that nature renders | |
| (You’ll never hear it in the family pew), | 30 |
| The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things? | |
| Then listen to the wild,—it ’s calling you. | |
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| They have cradled you in custom, they have primed you with their preaching, | |
| They have soaked you in convention through and through; | |
| They have put you in a showcase; you’re a credit to their teaching— | 35 |
| But can’t you hear the wild?—it ’s calling you. | |
| Let us probe the silent places, let us seek what luck betide us: | |
| Let us journey to a lonely land I know. | |
| There ’s a whisper on the night-wind, there ’s a star agleam to guide us, | |
| And the wild is calling, calling … let us go. | 40 |
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