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.
Themes
The Danger of Reckless Greed
The death of Sam McGee offers a cautionary tale about the effects of greed. As the speaker, Cap, recounts, “The land of gold seemed to hold [Sam] like a spell” (Line 11). Despite the hardships of prospecting in the frigid wastes of the Yukon and never actually striking a lode, and despite his rapidly deteriorating health, Sam McGee has gold fever. He refuses to give up the longshot dream of finding easy riches. Raised in balmy faraway Tennessee, “where the cotton blooms and grows” (Line 9), Sam complains endlessly about the conditions in the Klondike where, as Cap points out, if “our eyes we’d close, then the lashes froze till someone couldn’t see” (Line 15). Sam acknowledges as much, as the speaker recalls Sam saying “[h]e’d sooner live in hell” (12).
Sam, however, refuses to abandon his dream of wealth. The 1890’s Klondike Gold Rush was itself sparked by sensationalized media accounts that promised troves of gold (See: Background). Sam and Cap, both still poor, both still hungry for wealth, struggle now just to survive, the dream of wealth becoming more and more ironic. In this, and given that the poem is set on and around Christmas Day, Service affirms a lesson that echoes Christ’s many familiar parables that decried the accumulation of wealth as toxic and those who pursue it as fools.
The Formidable Challenge of Nature
By the turn of the 20th century, Western civilization liked the idea that nature had been domesticated, that technology, science, and urban sprawl had reduced Nature (capital N) to nature, pretty flower gardens, manicured lawns, and tree-lined parks. Nature, here, is a forbidding energy. The howling wastes of the Klondike make ironic the notion of a domesticated nature or of a sublime and loving maternal energy. Nature here is unrelenting cold, biting winds that “stabbed like a driven nail” (Line 14), temperatures that could freeze eyes shut. The poem is set in mid-winter Yukon when the sun is at best a hint and long cold nights stretch to 20 hours. The sheer vastness of the Yukon itself diminishes the miners into irrelevancy: “In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring / Howled out their woes to the homeless snows” (Lines 35-36).
However, Service, a harbinger existentialist, refuses to see nature as some adversary. Nature does not target the prospectors. In fact, when Service focuses on the night sky, it is star-spangled, the radiant stars “dancing” (Line 18) overhead the night of Sam McGee’s grim cremation. Nature is not cruel or beautiful—that is fanciful Romantic propaganda—but rather nature simply, terrifyingly, is.
The Compelling Power of a Promise
The poem is driven by the power of a meaningless promise. Sam McGee, in his dying hours and sick of the polar chill, fears that he would be buried, left behind in some “icy grave” (Line 23). Desperate, he asks Cap, who happens to be sleeping next to him around the campfire, to cremate him. Cap promises that he will see to Sam’s cremation, recalling that “[h]e seemed so low that [he] couldn’t say no” (Line 21). The promise is foolish, as Cap quickly finds out. He comes to loathe the cold, dead weight of Sam McGee’s corpse, as he must drag it, day after day, about the Klondike wilderness in search of a suitable clearing and the requisite supply of dry firewood, not only to build a funeral pyre but also, most importantly, to make good his promise.
That determination speaks to Cap’s character. “You promised true,” he imagines the corpse reminding him, “and it’s up to you to cremate those last remains” (Line 32). Cap keeps his word despite the obvious: He owes Sam McGee nothing. They are hardly lifelong friends. Cap could easily have left Sam McGee’s corpse behind and gone about the business of prospecting. In a poem that otherwise sternly admonishes against the reckless pull of wealth and that positions its characters in a forbidding and indifferent universe that renders ironic any notion of the dignity and worth of the individual, the poem offers Cap’s code of conduct as the sole positive force in an unremittingly bleak world. In his search for a cremation site, Cap refuses to give in to circumstances and refuses to break his promise, even though no one would know. His promise matters to him—that kind of singular grace dignifies Cap and, despite the poem’s comic ending, gives the poem its noblest thematic energy.
