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Robert W Service - Lost ShepherdRobert W Service - Lost Shepherd
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Ah me! How hard is destiny! If we could only know. . . . I bought my son from Sicily A score of years ago; I haled him from our sunny vale To streets of din and squalor, And left it to professors pale To make of him a scholar. Had he remained a peasant lad, A shepherd on the hill, like golden faun in goatskin clad He might be singing still; He would have made the flock his care And lept with gay reliance On thymy heights, unwitting there Was such a thing as science. He would have crooned to his guitar, Draughts of chianti drinking; A better destiny by far Than reading, writing, thinking. So bent above his books was he, His thirst for knowledge slaking, He did not realize that we Are worm-food in the making. Ambition got him in its grip And inched him to his doom; Fate granted him a fellowship, Then graved for him a tomb. "Beneath my feet I can`t allow The grass to grow," he said; And toiled so tirelessly that now It grows above his head. His honour scrolls shall feed the flame, They mean no more to me; His ashes I with bitter blame Will take to Sicily. And there I`ll weep with heart bereft, By groves and sunny rills, And wish my laughing boy I`d left A shepherd on the hills.
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