Robert W. Service, trained as a journalist, understands how to put a story together, and the tale of Cap’s ill-considered pledge to his dying friend follows the familiar movement of a story from exposition to resolution.

Lines 1 to 12, the prelude to the Christmas night that Cap agrees to cremate Sam McGee, functions as the exposition. The speaker entices his audience with the tease of the prelude, promising a story that would make “your blood run cold” (Line 4) and dropping the word “cremated” (Line 8), which itself conjures Gothic elements. The speaker sets up what will be the first of several oppositions that create the poem’s rising tension. Here he juxtaposes Sam’s home in Tennessee “where cotton blooms and grows” (Line 9) to the Klondike and its endlessly blowing snow. The exposition ends with the tension that will sustain the narrative action: the tension between Sam and the Yukon itself—there only because of the lure of gold but always whining that “he’d sooner live in hell” (Line 9).

Lines 13 to 40, the conflict, expand on that critical tension between the prospectors and the Yukon. The promise that Sam McGee extracts from the speaker hinges on that same tension: Sam does not want to be abandoned forever in an “icy grave” (Line 23).