The Cremation of Sam McGee

Robert W. Service, trained as a journalist, understands how to put a story together, and the tale of Cap’s ill-considered pledge to his dying friend follows the familiar movement of a story from exposition to resolution.

Lines 1 to 12, the prelude to the Christmas night that Cap agrees to cremate Sam McGee, functions as the exposition. The speaker entices his audience with the tease of the prelude, promising a story that would make “your blood run cold” (Line 4) and dropping the word “cremated” (Line 8), which itself conjures Gothic elements. The speaker sets up what will be the first of several oppositions that create the poem’s rising tension. Here he juxtaposes Sam’s home in Tennessee “where cotton blooms and grows” (Line 9) to the Klondike and its endlessly blowing snow. The exposition ends with the tension that will sustain the narrative action: the tension between Sam and the Yukon itself—there only because of the lure of gold but always whining that “he’d sooner live in hell” (Line 9).

Lines 13 to 40, the conflict, expand on that critical tension between the prospectors and the Yukon. The promise that Sam McGee extracts from the speaker hinges on that same tension: Sam does not want to be abandoned forever in an “icy grave” (Line 23). Once Sam is dead, however, Cap suffers. Cap promises to help his friend before Sam actually tells him what he wants him to do. Cap feels hoodwinked into making a promise that is not only foolish but also dangerous. He will struggle to build a fire in such a howling wasteland in the middle of the arctic winter. The conflict hinges on Line 20, when Sam McGee draws on the unwritten law that a man’s last request cannot be refused, even in the Yukon: “I couldn’t say no” (Line 21), Cap claims. This section then plays on that conflict between the formidable realities of the Yukon—numbing cold, forbidding winds, encrusted snow—and Cap’s ill-considered vow. “You may tax your brawn and brains,” Cap chides himself aloud, “But you promised true” (Line 32). Because a “promise made is a debt unpaid” (Line 33), this unspoken code invalidates simple common sense: Abandon the body in the first snow drift and get back to the business of finding gold.

Coming upon the wrecked Alice May in Lines 41 to 48 begins the story’s resolution. Finally, entirely because of happenstance (Cap just happens upon the derelict sternwheeler), the promise can be kept. With sudden gusto, Cap pulls up sufficient planks and gathers stray fuel enough to bank a roaring pyre—“the flames just soared” (Line 47)—playing on the poem’s driving tension between forbidding cold and welcoming heat. The poem does not pretty up the reality of the cremation. Cap moves back from the ship’s wrecked hull because of “greasy smoke” (Line 52) from the burning corpse: “I guess he’s cooked” (Line 56), Cap says flippantly.

Ever the raconteur, however, Service does not allow the cremation of Sam McGee to serve as the denouement of his poem. There is one last turn of the screw. In Lines 49 to 60, the poem closes in chaos, as much horror as comedy. The return of the now-thawed Sam McGee (or his maybe-ghost, or perhaps Cap’s own hallucination)—who then chastises the speaker, Cap, to close the furnace door because he is letting out the heat—provides the story its luridly (un)satisfying comic/horror non-ending/ending, typical of the extravagant and melodramatic “scary” yarns told around campfires and in taverns. In this denouement, the poem achieves two ends that helped earn the poem its wide appeal: It preaches reassuring Sunday school-style wisdom (a person’s word is their oath) while at the same time winking and slyly hinting that, well, maybe not always. Although this is informal it fits with the overall tone of the guide and this writer specifically so I think OK to leave as is.