The Cremation Of Sam McGee was written by Robert Service and published in 1907. Robert Service was living in the Yukon during the 1896 gold rush when the wrote “The Cremation Of Sam McGee” and the poem was published 1907. The first stanza of the poem stages a setting for the piece. The speaker makes it very clear that the poem takes place where the sun shines all day and all night, where men work very hard in search of gold. In this first stanza, the speaker addressing that this is a place where very strange things happen, and that he had to cremate a man named Sam McGee.
The first stanza of this poem really gets the reader interested in the piece. The poem takes place in the Yukon during the gold rush. The speaker using context clues …show more content…
When he claims that strange things happen in this place, this leaves the reader mystified.
In stanza two of the poem, the speaker starts to describe a little about Sam McGee, like that he is from Tennessee, which is a warm place. Sam apparently left home to come to the North, but the speaker does not know why. It seems as though even though Sam was always cold and seems to hate the North, he never actually got up and left because the search for gold captivated him. The speaker said Sam would often say that he will sooner live in hell.
This poem uses internal rhyme, and the rhyme pattern goes AABBCC and so on. However the first and last stanzas have an irregular rhyme scheme of ABCDEFE. Every line of the poem has seven syllables. The first and last stanzas of the poem are the exact same stanza repeating them selves. Each stanza in the body of the poem has four lines, each having seven syllables.
It’s clear that Sam is not used to the icy cold temperatures of the arctic …show more content…
In line 37, he refers to the body as quiet clay, which gives an image of a heavy, quiet dead body. He is growing weary and hungry and says he felt half mad in line 39, which is a valid thought seeing as he starts singing to a corpse and imagines it grinning back at him. The image of him singing and the corpse grinning back gives a very haunting image to the reader. The speaker really wants the reader to feel the pain of the moment and sense the feeling of madness.
In this stanza, the reader can suddenly feel the mood lighten when the speaker finds this ship. In line 44, the last word is stretched out: “cre-ma-tor-eum” which is an interesting use of language from the writer. Also, when the speaker referred to as an object but now he is calling the body “his frozen chum”(Line 43). Now that he is not in a desperate situation, he re-humanizes the body.
Stanza eleven is where the speaker is preparing to cremate the body. He gets some wood from the floorboards of the ship, lights a fire in the boiler and uses some coal he found on the ship to fuel the flames. Once the fire started going, he digs a hole in the coals and stuffs Sam McGee’s body
The first stanza of this poem really gets the reader interested in the piece. The poem takes place in the Yukon during the gold rush. The speaker using context clues …show more content…
When he claims that strange things happen in this place, this leaves the reader mystified.
In stanza two of the poem, the speaker starts to describe a little about Sam McGee, like that he is from Tennessee, which is a warm place. Sam apparently left home to come to the North, but the speaker does not know why. It seems as though even though Sam was always cold and seems to hate the North, he never actually got up and left because the search for gold captivated him. The speaker said Sam would often say that he will sooner live in hell.
This poem uses internal rhyme, and the rhyme pattern goes AABBCC and so on. However the first and last stanzas have an irregular rhyme scheme of ABCDEFE. Every line of the poem has seven syllables. The first and last stanzas of the poem are the exact same stanza repeating them selves. Each stanza in the body of the poem has four lines, each having seven syllables.
It’s clear that Sam is not used to the icy cold temperatures of the arctic …show more content…
In line 37, he refers to the body as quiet clay, which gives an image of a heavy, quiet dead body. He is growing weary and hungry and says he felt half mad in line 39, which is a valid thought seeing as he starts singing to a corpse and imagines it grinning back at him. The image of him singing and the corpse grinning back gives a very haunting image to the reader. The speaker really wants the reader to feel the pain of the moment and sense the feeling of madness.
In this stanza, the reader can suddenly feel the mood lighten when the speaker finds this ship. In line 44, the last word is stretched out: “cre-ma-tor-eum” which is an interesting use of language from the writer. Also, when the speaker referred to as an object but now he is calling the body “his frozen chum”(Line 43). Now that he is not in a desperate situation, he re-humanizes the body.
Stanza eleven is where the speaker is preparing to cremate the body. He gets some wood from the floorboards of the ship, lights a fire in the boiler and uses some coal he found on the ship to fuel the flames. Once the fire started going, he digs a hole in the coals and stuffs Sam McGee’s body