'On the Marge of Lake Lebarge'

Memory has no conscience and little sense of good taste. It’s our most intimate capacity yet often feels alien, as though we were recalling the memories of someone else. In the past, of course, we were someone else. As a kid I watched ridiculous amounts of television, which is why I remember the lyrics to the Green Acres theme. The same gift, if that’s what it is, helped me memorize yards of poetry, much of it first-rate – Eliot, Kipling, Yeats, Tate. But I also committed to memory many lines of doggerel and quasi-doggerel, especially when the poems in question were highly rhythmic, even singable. Take Robert Service: 

“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.”

 

I defy you to read those last three lines and not want to sing them. I can’t remember how I learned portions of “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” whether in class or on my own. It helped that I liked cowboy movies and the stories of Jack London. Moil (not to be confused with mohel) is a verb meaning, the OED tells us, “to toil, work hard, drudge.”

Service was born in England, grew up in Scotland and emigrated to Canada at age twenty-one. His timing was superb, as the Klondike Gold Rush started in 1896. Service wanted to be a cowboy. He published Songs of a Sourdough in 1907. Besides “Sam McGee,” it includes his other greatest hit, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” with the memorable opening line, “A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon.” Service is no Eliot or even a Kipling, but a handful of his poems are memorable and entertaining, and complement my stride when I’m out walking.

 

Service was born on this date, January 16, in 1874 and died on September 11, 1958 at age eighty-four.