ALONG THE ANGLOSPHERE:

[T]wo weekends ago, as he was campaigning across New Hampshire, a team of comics with a camera crew from the cable network Comedy Central clambered aboard his campaign bus to enlist him in their own little game of gotcha.

Who's your favorite poet? they asked McCain.

According to the cosmology of the sophisticates at Comedy Central, politicians are not supposed to have favorite poets.

McCain hesitated, and then said, "Robert Service, I guess."

Okay, the comedians pressed as the cameras rolled, then recite some of his poetry.

Gotcha? Here again, the Comedy Central team revealed their own provincialism. They were apparently ignorant of one of the ironclad rules of modern poetry: Anyone who likes Robert Service can recite Robert Service. By the yard.

And that's what McCain did. After a bumpy push-off, by one witness's account, he ran through all 14 stanzas of "The Cremation of Sam McGee," Service's great ballad that deathlessly begins 

  

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 . . .

Service is best known for his narrative poems set in gold rush-era Yukon, where the poet himself lived for many years at the turn of the century. "Sam McGee," like his other great ballad, "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," is a celebration of men in extremity, leavened by a black-humor joke at the end. With their march-beat rhythms and simple rhyme schemes, his poems were written to be memorized and recited, and as a result Service was second only to Kipling as the poet of choice for at least two generations of American boys.

In his autobiography, Ronald Reagan recalls discovering a book of Service poems during his boyhood. "I reread 'The Shooting of Dan McGrew' so many times that years later, on the occasional nights when I had trouble falling asleep [Reagan? Insomnia?], I'd remember every word and recite it silently to myself until I bore myself into slumber. If I still couldn't sleep, I'd switch to 'The Cremation of Sam McGee,' and that usually did it."

Manly, sentimental, easily digestible, Service might be considered a poet of the Reaganite school -- not the most crowded school in the world of poetry. Reagan was noted among his friends for his tendency to let fly with Service at odd moments. In his book he describes a state dinner with the Queen Mother on one side of him and Pierre Trudeau, the insufferable pseud who served interminably as premier of Canada, on the other. Trudeau said he'd heard that Reagan could recite "Dan McGrew" from memory and challenged him to do so. The Queen Mother urged him on, saying she was a great fan of the poem's central character, "the lady that's known as Lou." Reagan obliged, unburdening himself of all 11 stanzas, with the Queen Mother chiming in at each mention of Lou. When they were finished, according to Reagan's account anyway, the table erupted in applause -- probably excepting Trudeau, that snot. Royal-watchers, by the way, will be pleased to know that the Queen Mother's favorite, the lady that's known as Lou, is a homicidal slut. [...]

On the bus in New Hampshire, the wise-asses from Comedy Central were apparently impressed with McCain's performance. As they were breaking down their camera equipment, McCain mentioned offhandedly how he had come to memorize "Sam McGee."

"The guy in the cell next to me," he said, "it was his favorite poem. He used to tap it to me on the wall, in Morse Code. That's how I memorized it."

He gotcha.

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