Analysis of ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ by Robert Service
‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ by Robert Service is a poem that helps to illustrate the problems that people who live in the Arctic wilderness struggle with. The poem is about Sam McGee and his friend in a freezing winter in Yukon, the two came in search of Northern gold all the way from Tennessee. Sam does not like the cold and he ends up freezing to death, before he dies he illustrates his friend to cremate him as his dying wish ‘So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains’ (Stanza 5 line 4). All this is because he detests getting buried in the frozen ground helping to bring out the theme of death in the poem. The speaker has to keep his promise to Sam after his death, something that is very difficult given the ground is frozen and making a fire is not an easy task. The speaker is hence to take a trip to find a place where it would be easy to cremate his friend Sam. He is forced to carry Sam’s heavy frozen body all through his trip and it is an illustration of his dedication to keep his promise and hence brings out the theme of loyalty in the poem.
As soon as he finds a good spot, he begins to burn Sam and he is disgusted by the task, he decides to leave the body to burn on its own. He is shocked when he comes back to see of the body had burn up to find Sam alive and well. This part of the poem is confusing in that it is not understood whether the speaker is hallucinating or what he sees is real. The extreme weather condition could have affected the speaker to appoint where his mental capacity was unstable, this is evidenced by ‘And I’d often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin.’ (Stanza 9 line 4). The speaker in this stanza illustrates that he could see the corpse of Sam smiling at him, something that is not possible.
This poem has fifteen stanzas that cab be described as quatrain except for stanza one and fifteen given that they all have four lines. The rhyme scheme in the first stanza is irregular but all the other stanzas have regular rhyme scheme. Various literary devices have been used throughout the poem; personification for instance is evident in the first few stanzas, ‘The Arctic trails have their secret tales’, (stanza 1 line 3). The arctic are in this case personified to look like human beings that can keep secrets. Assonance is evident in the repetition of the vowel sound /ou/ in ‘Howled out their woes to the homeless snows Howled out their woes to the homeless snows- O God! how I loathed the thing’ (Stanza 8 line 4). There is also repetition of sound /a/ in ‘A pal’s last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail’ (Stanza 6 line 1). Consonance is also evident in the poem for instance in sound /n/ in ‘Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm’ (Stanza 14 line 8) and also repetition of sound /r/ in ‘There wasn’t a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven’ (Stanza 7 line 1). Refrain is also a poetic device that has been used in the poem where the first stanza has been repeated in the last stanza.
Works Cited
Service, Robert W. “The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert W. Service.” Poetry
Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45081/the-cremation-of-sam-mcgee.
