In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load. Popularity of the Poem, “The Cremation of Sam McGee”:Robert W. Service, a popular British … © 2020 Shmoop University Inc | All Rights Reserved | Privacy | Legal. It was published in 1907 in Songs of a Sourdough.
JavaScript seems to be disabled in your browser. The place Service is describing is the Yukon in Canada (right up next to Alaska), which is so far north that the sun shines all day in the summer, even at midnight.
It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don’t know why; And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky.
Ballad, short narrative folk song, whose distinctive style crystallized in Europe in the late Middle Ages and persists to the present day in communities where literacy, urban contacts, and mass media have little affected the habit of folk singing.
The term ballad is also applied to any narrative…, Poetry, literature that evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound, and rhythm.
They let us know that we’re in the land of the midnight sun, where men "moil" (that just means to work really hard) in search of gold.
Apparently there have been plenty of "queer" (meaning "odd" or "strange") goings-on under the Northern Lights. And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow. (You can read more about the Northern Lights. I guess he’s cooked, and it’s time I looked”; … then the door I opened wide. Why he left his home in the South to roam ‘round the Pole, God only knows. The Cremation of Sam McGee, ballad by Robert Service, published in Canada in 1907 in Songs of a Sourdough (U.S. title, The Spell of the Yukon, and Other Verses). One last thing about this line. I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear; But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near; I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: “I’ll just take a peep inside. Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay; It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the “Alice May.” And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum; Then “Here,” said I, with a sudden cry, “is my cre-ma-tor-eum.”. That’s all we get for now. Did the teaser work? A popular success upon publication, this exaggerated folktale about a pair of Yukon gold miners was reprinted 15 times in its first year. After placing the body in a blazing furnace, the narrator takes a last look into the fire and hears McGee urge him to close the door before the heat escapes.