When I was a kid I remember looking up at the planes crossing overhead and dreaming I was up there on some fantastic adventure to some faraway locale.
Here in New York, the planes pass by every few minutes and that novelty they once had has since worn off. But every now and then I glance out the window and that excitement comes back.
When I read Robert Service’s poem ‘A Land of Beyone’ in a greeting card a few years ago I felt that excitement and wanderlust again. And even though it speaks of a different time, before planes made it so easy to travel far and wide, the hunger to discover and excitement to explore is still so clearly evident in his writing. And each time I read it, I feel like that little kid again, staring up a plane passing overhead.
Land of Beyond
Have you ever heard of the Land of Beyond,
That dreams at the gates of the day?
Alluring it lies at the skirts of the skies,
And ever so far away;
Alluring it calls: O ye the yoke galls,
And ye of the trail overfond,
With saddle and pack, by paddle and track,
Let’s go to the Land of Beyond!
Have you ever stood where the silences brood,
And vast the horizons begin,
At the dawn of the day to behold far away
The goal you would strive for and win?
Yet ah! in the night when you gain to the height,
With vast pool of heaven star-spawned,
Afar and agleam, like a valley of dream,
Still mocks you a Land of Beyond.
Thank God! there is always the Land of Beyond
For us who are true to the trail;
A vision to seek, a beckoning peak,
A farness that never will fail;
A pride in our soul that mocks at a goal,
A manhood that irks at a bond,
And try how we will, unattainable still,
Behold it, our Land of Beyond!
—Robert Service
