The Cremation of Sam McGee

“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.