Ballad of the Northern Lights

Today is birthday of the Canadian poet Robert Service who moved to Canada in 1897 and wrote ballads of life in the Yukon. Below are some aurora references excerpted from his "The Ballad of the Northern Lights". A strong solar wind is now blowing against Earth, causing high-latitude geomagnetic storms which produce auroras. If it intensifies a little, we can hope for northern lights in mid latitudes. Meanwhile enjoy his verse and dream of auroras to come....

Excerpts from
The Ballad of the Northern Lights
By Robert Service

Oh, it was wild and weird and wan, and ever in camp o' nights

We would watch and watch the silver dance of the mystic Northern Lights.

And soft they danced from the Polar sky and swept in primrose haze;

And swift they pranced with their silver feet, and pierced with a blinding blaze.

They danced a cotillion in the sky; they were rose and silver shod;

It was not good for the eyes of man--'twas a sight for the eyes of God.

It made us mad and strange and sad, and the gold whereof we dreamed

Was all forgot, and our only thought was of the lights that gleamed.

Oh, the tundra sponge it was golden brown, and some was a bright blood-red;

And the reindeer moss gleamed here and there like the tombstones of the dead.

And in and out and around about the little trail ran clear,

And we hated it with a deadly hate and we feared with a deadly fear.

And the skies of night were alive with light, with a throbbing, thrilling flame;

Amber and rose and violet, opal and gold it came.

It swept the sky like a giant scythe, it quivered back to a wedge;

Argently bright, it cleft the night with a wavy golden edge.

Pennants of silver waved and streamed, lazy banners unfurled;

Sudden splendors of sabres gleamed, lightning javelins were hurled.

There in our awe we crouched and saw with our wild, uplifted eyes

Charge and retire the hosts of fire in the battlefield of the skies.

And the Northern Lights in the crystal nights came forth with a mystic gleam.

They danced and they danced the devil-dance over the naked snow;

And soft they rolled like a tide upshoaled with a ceaseless ebb and flow.

They rippled green with a wondrous sheen, they fluttered out like a fan;

They spread with a blaze of rose-pink rays never yet seen of man.

They writhed like a brood of angry snakes, hissing and sulphur pale;

Then swift they changed to a dragon vast, lashing a cloven tail.

It seemed to us, as we gazed aloft with an everlasting stare,

The sky was a pit of bale and dread, and a monster revelled there.

Day after day was dark as death, but ever and ever at nights,

With a brilliancy that grew and grew, blazed up the Northern Lights.

They rolled around with a soundless sound like softly bruised silk;

They poured into the bowl of the sky with the gentle flow of milk.

In eager, pulsing violet their wheeling chariots came,

Or they poised above the Polar rim like a coronal of flame.

From depths of darkness fathomless their lancing rays were hurled,

Like the all-combining search-lights of the navies of the world.

There on the roof-pole of the world as one bewitched I gazed,

And howled and grovelled like a beast as the awful splendors blazed.
My eyes were seared, yet thralled I peered through the parka hood nigh blind;

But I staggered on to the lights that shone, and never I looked behind.

Some say that the Northern Lights are the glare of the Arctic ice and snow;

And some that it's electricity, and nobody seems to know.

But I'll tell you now--and if I lie, may my lips be stricken dumb--

It's a mine, a mine of the precious stuff that men call radium.

(Robert Service may have dreamed of getting rich mining radium and gold, but we now know that the northern lights are excited gases glowing in the upper atmosphere, just like giant, wild neon lights.)

For some really cool photos, legends and science about the aurora, check out:

http://www.gi.alaska.edu/asahi/asahimap.htm