“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.”
Robert Service, “The Cremation of Sam McGee”
For some unfathomable reason, every year about this time I get out my COLLECTED POEMS OF ROBERT SERVICE and read through the selections night after night—especially those narratives set in North America’s last frontier. There is something infinitely exciting and wonderful in reading about the utterly frozen northern reaches of the world—when winter gales are howling outside our windows and we are snuggly secured in a warm bed, in a warm house.
My love for Robert Service goes back to the 1940s, and my Wauwatosa High School days. Forensics were big in schools back then, and each year I competed in the dramatic reading division. Always, someone would recite from Robert Service—choosing “Sam McGee” or the “The Shooting of Dan McGrew, and presenting these narratives with hilarious tonal effects as well as body language.
I wonder if (and seriously doubt that) contemporary young people have ever heard of Robert Service, let alone read him! Do today’s students even know what a narrative poem is? If not, I wonder if they have a gnawing sense of missing something vital—some integral aspect of the human experience! The oral tradition of the narrative poem predates written history; it is as essential to the whole person as those material basics of water, food, and air. Like music, the narrative poem is ancient and universal!
I grew up on English language poetry—line upon line, volume upon volume, year upon year of it. Ingrained in my soul are lines from classic narratives such as:
“The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding . . .
Riding . . . riding,
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn door.”
Alfred Noyes, “The Highwayman”
The spell binding quality of the narrative is unknown to many today; yet it is familiar to the youngest child whose parents have the good sense to read aloud to him or her from small babyhood on. I have grandsons who love poetry, and write verses with ease, because their mother read to them from Day One—as she nursed them. Children love narratives and any other poetry containing rhyme and meter. Even an extremely active child will slow down and go dreamy eyed in the presence of a real poem—which, when read with sensitivity, is a form of music!
Perhaps many of us who write poetry today tend to eschew structure in our lines because of the Greeting Card Phobia! Greeting cards are fun to receive, and I confess I sometimes send them to friends and family members. But what is inside a greeting card is normally so generic and predictable, it deserves the classification of TRITE! We poets tend to shrink from producing anything that might read like a greeting card!
I know that I have written a number of ”poems” which are not really poems at all; rather they are prose paragraphs strung out in lines to resemble a poem! Contemporary poetry can abound in figurative language, apt metaphors, and depth of content. Yet if you were to unstring some of my poems, and format them into paragraphs, you would be struck by their “prosy-ness”!
Surrounded in my home by stacks and shelves laden with centuries of great poetry, I continually fill my hunger with pages from the past. I honor my “debt” to our English language heritage by immersion—and thereby feed my eager soul in the process!
Margaret L. Been, ©2012
