Mother’s Button Box
By Robert Service

The pictures never fail to please,
When memory I tap,
Of Mother sweetly shelling peas
With sunshine in her lap;
Or sitting by a fire that glows,
And darning Father’s socks;
Or rummaging with specks on nose
In her old button box.

 Five hundred buttons were her store, --
I know, I counted them;
Some matched those on the pants I wore,
Some sparkled like a gem.
Such colours as I never dreamed,
Of every shape and size:
Ah! Though a lad to me it seemed
A playbox paradise. 

When I was down with chicken-pox
And could not go with boys,
I asked for Mother’s button box,
And scorned my books and toys.
I ranged the buttons battlewise
On blanket hills and dales,
With childish rapture in my eyes,
Forgetting all my ails.

 But came Big Brother with a laugh;
He mocked my war array,
And scattered all my troops like chaff,
Jibing “What baby play!”
Aye, with a hoisting of the sheet
The platoons on my bed
He heaped in pitiless deafeat …
I wept, --I wished him dead.

 Now Mother’s gone and Father’s gone
And Brother’s in his tomb,
While weak and wan I linger on,
Indifferent to doom.
Amid a world I never made,
That rack and ruin rocks,
I doze and dream of days I played
With Mother’s button box. 

(Robert Service (1874-1958) was a Yukon poet at the time of the Yukon goldrush and many of his poems are about the hardships that men endured while looking for gold.  I assume that the lines in this poem, “Amid a world I never made, That rack and ruin rocks.” refer to the gold fields. The poem is from the collection "Songs for My Supper".

 This is a sad poem, but I found it interesting that Service invokes the memories of home and of his youth through the metaphor of the button box.

 Service once said: “The only society I like is that which is rough and tough - and the tougher the better. That's where you get down to bedrock and meet human people."  Some of his more famous poems are: The Shooting of Dan McGrew, The Cremeation of Sam McGee, The Spell of the Yukon.  Many are ballads.  This quote is from The Cremeation of Sam McGee:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
    By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
    That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
    But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
    I cremated Sam McGee.