Dan McGrew, Sam McGee: The poems of Robert Service

by Robert W. Service

The ethos of Robert Service's poems is a raw barroom machismo, a celebration of those red-blooded Real Men who, when put to the test, will survive.

Another theme of these Yukon poems is that of the wanderer--a fantasy of the bourgeoisie, albeit one that Service actually lived. rootlessness has, of course, always figured in the American/Canadian cultural lexicon since the days of Fenimore Cooper and Daniel Boone. In Service's writing, however, the wanderer acquired an almost holy and enigmatic sense of mission.

Finally, the third and most pervasive theme of these poems is nature itself, the venue in which the Real Men characters perform, and are found worthy or wanting. If ever this bard of the backlands rises to the eloquent grandeur of his themes, it is in these evocations of what he called, variously, the Great Cold, the Long Night, the Great Alone, and the eternally brooding Great White Silence; the Silence, "you most could hear."

Genres: Poetry

190 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

This author is the the British-Canadian writer of Yukon poetry. For the British historian of modern Russia, see Robert Service.

Robert William Service was born into a Scottish family while they were living in Preston, England. He was schooled in Scotland, attending Hillhead High School in Glasgow. He moved to Canada at the age of 21 when he gave up his job working in a Glasgow bank, and traveled to Vancouver Island, British Columbia with his Buffalo Bill outfit and dreams of becoming a cowboy.

He drifted around western North America, taking and quitting a series of jobs. Hired by the Canadian Bank of Commerce, he worked in a number of its branches before being posted to the branch in Whitehorse (not Dawson) in the Yukon Territory in 1904, six years after the Klondike Gold Rush. Inspired by the vast beauty of the Yukon wilderness, Service began writing poetry about the things he saw.

Conversations with locals led him to write about things he hadn't seen, many of which hadn't actually happened, as well. He did not set foot in Dawson City until 1908, arriving in the Klondike ten years after the Gold Rush, but his renown as a writer was already established.

For more information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Service.

Reviews

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Manly poetry.

[Max Christiansen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book full to the brim with poems and ballads. Now, the poems are fairly interesting to read. The plots of them are interesting, and have good characters. The problem that I had is that they are really long, and are written in old english. This makes it so that they are hard to push through when reading. Overall, I enjoyed this book. Just wish the poems were a little more interesting.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never read any of his collections, only poems picked up from here and there. (And The Cremation of Sam McGee, obviously, in childhood.) I find Service boring when he talks about women (I find he has an internalized misogyny of sorts, sadly) and war (not a topic that really stokes me), but of course he absolutely soars when he talks about the wilderness. Because that's a place where gender and wealth and infighting and belongings don't really exist, and that's where his writing flies.

[Nathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Robert Service has the honor of being the favorite poet of both myself and Ronald Reagan.

He's not that great a poet but was immensely influential on my childhood and heavily affected my understanding of how a man should behave in the world.

"The poppies gleamed like bloody pools through cotton-woolly mists..."

[Chelsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the cremation of Sam McGee so much that I now know it off my heart. I really enjoyed how even my grandfather knows the poem as well as I do. A good ballad obviously spans many generations.

[NancyS · Rating 5 out of 5]

All my favorites with the added bonus of great illustrations.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyable poetry. We have all read the cremation of Sam McGee but the rest of Service's work holds up. Wordsworth? No. But it makes me miss the winter like nothing else.