Because of their lyrical rhythms and balanced rhymes, Service's verses are easy to remember and recite aloud. They exhibit the qualities of an oral tradition of an earlier age, when minstrels and bards wandered about, singing songs and reciting adventures. Ballads are simply poems meant to be sung. Like most ballads, Service's tell dramatic stories of courage, romance, or heroic defeat. Above all, they seek to entertain.

Service considered himself to be more a maker of "verse" than a poet of serious art. Ballads such as Service's have often been regarded as an inferior form of poetry because of their emphasis upon meter and rhyme. Even Service himself conceded that, while his verse may not be "great literature," it was what he preferred to write. His own style of poetry, then, reflects the same sort of individualism he wrote about.

Actually, the metrical regularity of his...