Dan McGrew, Sam McGee: The poems of Robert 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."