Songs of a Sourdough · Chapter
The Rhyme of the Remittance Man explained
A man living alone in the Yukon reflects on his choice to abandon the wealth and society of London and Paris for a simple, solitary life in the wilderness.
What happens
A man living alone in the Yukon reflects on his choice to abandon the wealth and society of London and Paris for a simple, solitary life in the wilderness. He finds happiness in nature, hunting, and the quiet beauty of his surroundings, and declares himself forever signed to nature, rejecting the judgment of those who call him a failure.
Themes in this chapter
The Call of the Wild
The narrator has answered the call of the wild, leaving behind civilization for a life of freedom in nature.
Loneliness and Despair
Though the narrator claims happiness, the poem is suffused with a sense of isolation and the melancholy of being an outcast from his former world.
Characters to notice
- Master
The narrator, a remittance man who has left his former life behind to live in the Yukon.
Key passages
“I am one of you no longer: by the trails my feet have broken, The dizzy peaks I’ve scaled, the campfire’s glow, By the lonely seas I’ve sailed in—yea, the final word is spoken, I am signed and sealed to nature. Be it so.”
I have permanently left your world behind; my experiences in the wilderness have marked me as belonging to nature, not to society.
The narrator definitively renounces his former life and embraces his identity as a man of the wild.