An Ode to Mom, Robert Service, and The Cremation of Sam McGee

My mom hated musicals,

fairy tales, movies like The Wizard of Oz,
school, required reading, and Santa Claus.

Her father was a bricklayer with an eighth-grade education
but he read Homer, Tennyson, Plato and Sophocles.
Her mother, a school teacher, died in my mom's infancy.

On the banks of the Cedar River she ran free
catching sunfish for breakfast, frying it over a fire,
and baking pies from scratch in a wood-burning oven
before the ripe old age of ten.
This is her legacy, her earthy history,
a good girl by nature, a wild child who was well-behaved,
who never talked back or sassed or disobeyed.

Never bitter, never laying blame,
this Depression-era gal accepted her lot,
resourceful and stoic, an old soul and a dancing flame,
Lovely and loving however many lumps she got.

Go to college, her big brother said,
Not for me, said she, sweetly, politely,
and married a farmer instead.
Five daughters--no sons!
All work and no play, when each day was done.

She's with us still, my unlettered mother,
who outlived all her cousins, her brothers,
who wants to be buried beside her teenage daughter,
but Mom's plot was bought
before her firstborn went six feet under.

"Lay a quilt over my casket, not a floral display,
and my coronet over that; find a trumpeter if you can
though if you skip the service, I understand,
but the church ladies owe me a funeral luncheon
for all the times I've served."

For all the work she's done, all the people she's served,
It's more than one luncheon she deserves.
Heaven's gates should open wide for this bonny lass
with angels heralding her arrival and rose petals lining her path
and her own mom there to greet her at last,
along with the daughter taken so cruelly.

Let it not be the story of Mom's life,
losing loved ones so prematurely.
Let them all meet again in joyous eternity.
If her God is real, so they will.

All the hours and days and years of her life
surrendered on behalf of others
should be returned to her, with dividends,
and songs of praise for her innumerable good deeds,
for all the love she gave, disregarding her own needs.

My motherless mother, my much-loved mom,
Somehow, still, keeps going on,
and I would be wise and well-advised
to drop these words and go visit her now.
The road is calling, and Dad still remembers my name,
though he lives in yesterday and can't recall today.

Auf wiedersehen!

Mom on her 80th birthday, photo (and cake) by me

Not a ballad, I know,

not even a poem, just some random musings triggered by @Raj808's Thursday's Poetry Challenge - Exploring Legend. If you haven't seen it, go, go, and read Raj's excellent example, The Ballad of Morveren.

This is not an entry to that challenge, but a response, for what it's worth.

I barely remember my mom's father, who died young, but I would admire, on a shelf high above me, his 1920s editions of Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Tennyson, and other exulted (or is exalted?) authors who never tempted my mom to open those mellow, delicate, antique pages. When Mom read to us, it was from the Bible or a book of illustrated stories from the Bible. Samson, Queen Esther, David slaying Goliath: these were the epic heroes of my childhood. Homer's Ulysses would come much later.

The most epic literary event of my childhood was the occasional cold, cold winter night, when Mom would recite, from memory, an entire ballad by Robert Service, "The Cremation of Sam McGee." Like Sam, she "was always cold," until she reached middle age and hot flashes, and now she's never not-hot.

A contemporary of Jack London, popular in his day, Robert Service was famous and successful and now un-remembered, to the point that he (along with my beloved Eugene Fields) was held up as an example of "pulp" poetry, or some equivalent of pulp fiction, when I inexplicably went to college as an English major (did Mom and Dad, pragmatists, realists, get saddled with someone else's baby in the hospital?). My farm roots never left me, though; I slogged through more academic tomes while secretly enjoying fairy tales, fantasy, science fiction, and authors not taught in the hallowed realm of academia. My training was in literary criticism, but what the critics dismissed as doggerel, I embraced.

Rather than consume bandwidth extolling the virtues of Robert Service, I give you his ballad here:

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he'd often say in his homely way that he'd "sooner live in hell".

On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.
Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see;
It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.

And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow,
And the dogs were fed, and the stars o'erhead were dancing heel and toe,
He turned to me, and "Cap," says he, "I'll cash in this trip, I guess;
And if I do, I'm asking that you won't refuse my last request."

Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no; then he says with a sort of moan:
"It's the cursed cold, and it's got right hold till I'm chilled clean through to the bone.
Yet 'tain't being dead -- it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains;
So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains."

A pal's last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail;
And we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale.
He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee;
And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee.

There wasn't a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,
With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid, because of a promise given;
It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say:
"You may tax your brawn and brains,
But you promised true, and it's up to you to cremate those last remains."

Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load.
In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring,
Howled out their woes to the homeless snows -- O God! how I loathed the thing.

And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;
And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;
The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in;
And I'd often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin.

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."

Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire;
Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher;
The flames just soared, and the furnace roared -- such a blaze you seldom see;
And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee.

Then I made a hike, for I didn't like to hear him sizzle so;
And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow.
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.

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.
I guess he's cooked, and it's time I looked"; . . . then the door I opened wide.

And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: "Please close that door.
It's fine in here, but I greatly fear you'll let in the cold and storm --
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

Robert William Service

Book Cover source - Read more about this poem at the source: On Robert Service’s The Cremation of Sam McGee by FACEINTHEBLUE

I have a lifelong relationship with Robert Service’s The Cremation of Sam McGee. It was one of my mother’s favourite bedtime stories ... it was the first time I ever heard of Tennessee, and so my mother would have to explain it was someplace very warm –though not tropical– many hours’ drive to the south of our quiet street in Toronto. Then she would have to explain that the Dawson Trail was on the far side of Canada from where I lay, tucked in under my covers. It was desperately cold there, but more than eighty years ago thousands of people came from all over the world to search for gold.... It was my first ghost story. It was the first time I heard of dog sleds, or ships trapped in the ice and abandoned. It might even have been the first story I ever heard where someone died.

Robert William Service (January 16, 1874 - September 11, 1958)
was a British-Canadian poet and writer, often called "the Bard of the Yukon".

Born in Lancashire of Scottish descent, he was a bank clerk by trade, but spent long periods travelling in Western America and Canada, often in some poverty. When his bank sent him to the Yukon, he was inspired by tales of the Klondike Gold Rush, and wrote two poems "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee", which showed remarkable authenticity from an author with no experience of gold-mining, and enjoyed immediate popularity. Encouraged by this, he quickly wrote more poems on the same theme, which were published as Songs of a Sourdough (re-titled The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses in the U.S.), and achieved a massive sale. When his next collection Ballads of a Cheechako proved equally successful, Service could afford to travel widely and live a leisurely life, basing himself in Paris and the French Riviera.

Partly because of their popularity, and the speed with which he wrote them, his works were dismissed as doggerel by the critics, who were tending to say the same of Kipling, with whom Service was often compared. This did not worry Service, who was happy to classify his work as “verse, not poetry”.

Not worried by the critics!

We should all be so free and at peace with our writing.