19 pages • 38 minutes read
Robert W. ServiceThe Cremation of Sam McGee
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1907A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form
“The Cremation of Sam McGee” harks to a time centuries ago in Europe, when poetry was sustained as a popular art through the agency of strolling minstrels who would enthrall townspeople, most illiterate, with exotic, riveting, sometimes tragic but often hilarious stories delivered with dramatic zest or sung to catchy melodies. These story-poems would be delivered in clever and engaging rhymes that not only delighted the audiences but also made the job of memorizing long ballads much easier for the minstrel. Robert W. Service recreates this form, recognizing its potential appeal to a mass market readership.
The ballad has 15 stanzas of four lines each, called quatrains, a formal device that urges the movement forward and keeps the focus on the action rather than reaction. The poem uses another formal convention of ballads: There is an irregular opening stanza (eight lines), a kind of prelude, here set off by italics, that is in turn reprised at the end of the poem like a refrain (a repeated group of lines)—a framing device standard in ballad form. In fact, the ballad form of narrative poetry such as “The Cremation of Sam McGee” can be likened to the story-songs of the modern folk song tradition.
Meter
As with conventional ballads, “The Cremation of Sam McGee” maintains a steady meter. Each line has six syllables, eight sets of what are called “iambs,” a two-beat unit in which the stress falls naturally on the second beat (as, for instance, in the word “complete” or the phrase “in short”). Iambic meter sounds un-poetic, even conversational, as it mimics the natural rhythm of speech. Eight units of iambic meter is termed iambic octameter. To avoid slipping too easily into sing-songy meter, the poem offers lines that vary a bit. In addition, the opening and its reprise at the end alternate iambic pentameter (10 syllables) and iambic tetrameter (eight syllables) to give them the feeling of framing the story itself.
In addition, the poem maintains a tight AA BB end rhyme pattern. And given the length of the lines, most of the lines contain internal rhymes at the same beat marker (for instance, in Line 11, “cold” is rhymed off “gold”; in Line 31, “sleigh” is rhymed off “say”; in fact, Service altered the name of the Canadian lake from Laberge to Lebarge to maintain the internal rhymes). Those metrical devices encourage creative recitation and invite dramatic pauses, called caesuras, which in turn encourage more individual recitation, which might account for the dozens of very different styled recordings of the poem.
Voice
Although the poet is Robert W. Service, a journalist fascinated with the stories of his adopted Yukon Territory, “The Cremation of Sam McGee” is itself framed as a narrated story. As such, the speaker is a character, in this case Cap, Sam McGee’s above-and-beyond friend from the prospecting camps who meets Sam along the Dawson Trail in the Yukon. The voiceover then is also a survivor—Cap has returned from that difficult winter experience with his health, his sanity, and his integrity intact. He has lived to tell the tale of cremating Sam McGee.
The opening sets up the defining characteristic of this voiceover: The speaker is a consummate storyteller. Cap understands pace and scene-management. He has an eye for details (the circle of howling huskies, for instance, or the twinkling night stars, or the gray greasy pall of Sam’s burning corpse). Supremely, the speaker providing voiceover is an entertainer. He wants to tell a riveting story and wants his audience intrigued, teased, and seduced into listening to the story of cremating Sam McGee. The speaker knows where the poem is going—to that Gothic ending in the style of Edgar Allan Poe, in which a very dead Sam McGee appears in the hellish fires of the furnace room. That, the speaker promises enticingly in the opening, is surely “the queerest” (Line 6) sight ever seen in the Klondike. That opening establishes intimacy—the reader positioned much like a bar crony of Cap’s settling down to hear a yarn sure to make “your blood run cold” (Line 4).
