The Cremation of Sam McGee

It could be argued that this is a Halloween poem set during Christmastime. The poem’s closing image of the dead prospector Sam McGee reclining in the roaring furnace fire symbolizes a wonderful kind of narrative open-endedness, a rollicking conclusion in which nothing is concluded. Service taps into the popular tradition of ballads, story-songs set to accessible and ear-friendly rhythms and rhymes designed to delight and engage. The climactic moment when Cap sees Sam McGee, smiling, sitting “cool and calm” (Line 57) in the heart of the raging furnace fire, is never resolved.

The “queerest” (Line 66) moment of Cap seeing Sam is offered without irony and without explanation. Many possibilities exist for the reader to interpret Sam’s presence: Perhaps Sam thawed like some frozen slab of venison, in a manic skewering of the Christian Easter belief in resurrection; maybe Cap is seeing the ghost of Sam McGee, a manifestation of a paranormal dimension now finally at peace, warm at last; the moment could be a Freudian projection of an honest Cap who is happy that his friend is at last out of the arctic cold but certain now of his own fast-approaching demise; or Cap could be having a simple hallucination, a wish projection, compelled by his own susceptibility to the extreme weather.