The Vinyl Café Notebooks
“I think of the opening paragraphs of Hugh MacLennan’s quintessential Canadian novel Two Solitudes and his poetic description of Montreal’s Sherbrooke Street on a snowy winter night. I think of William Kurelek’s sunny prairie paintings, of David Blackwood’s dark etchings of the great Newfoundland sealing disaster of 1914.
They all get part of it; they all come close to it in their own way, but none of them get closer to the heart of the matter, closer to the bone-numbing chill of a January wind,... than Robert W. Service, the bard of the Yukon, gets in that most famous of his poems, “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”
You know how it goes: 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 that is what I call poetry—an epic chiller about the night Sam McGee froze to death on the Klondike Trail and then sprung back to life, for a moment, on his funeral pyre.MoreLess
They all get part of it; they all come close to it in their own way, but none of them get closer to the heart of the matter, closer to the bone-numbing chill of a January wind,... than Robert W. Service, the bard of the Yukon, gets in that most famous of his poems, “The Cremation of Sam McGee.”
You know how it goes: 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 that is what I call poetry—an epic chiller about the night Sam McGee froze to death on the Klondike Trail and then sprung back to life, for a moment, on his funeral pyre.MoreLess
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