Vancouver Lights (Style)

Style

“Vancouver Lights” is a meditative-descriptive lyric. In five irregular stanzas, Birney uses a kind of visual prosody to map the poem and to embody the poem’s subjects. His inter- and intra-sentence spacings makes for a kind of staccato reading experience: we read the poem in the same way that the light and darkness Birney describes appear to him. Similarly, his enjambed lines emphasize the overlapping of the natural and the human worlds.

The poem’s descriptive elements utilize concrete imagery and symbolic metaphors to depict a turbulent sea and busy, chaotic city. The active verbs — “wimples,” “wraps,” “sucks,” “webs,” “vault,” “climb,” “falter,” “halt“ — used to describe the light and darkness in the first stanza echo the ebb and flow of the sea described in the second stanza. Light and darkness themselves symbolize the flow of time and the alternating currents of hope and despair throughout human history. Many of the metaphors employ visual images. For example, “this quilt of lamps” in the second stanza refers to the lights of Vancouver that Birney sees from the “mountain’s brutish forehead,” as does “this winking / outpost.” By referring to humanity as “unique glowworms,” Birney captures both the ephemeral quality of human life as well as its animal nature.

The poem’s didactic elements are embodied in Birney’s use of characters from Greek mythology. Just as the ancients used myths to make sense of their own world, so too does Birney use them to make sense of his. Birney’s use of myth is two-fold: on one hand he alludes to these characters and stories to emphasize the theme of creation; on the other hand he comments on the myths to highlight their function as stories. As long as we have history, Birney suggests, we cannot not have stories. But if we have them let’s tell the truth about ourselves.

The poem’s highly stylized diction and grammatical inversions also undergird the serious, grave tone of the poem and add to the image of the speaker as an oracle of sorts. At times phrases and metaphors veer towards melodrama and hyperbole, as when in the final stanza the speaker locates humanity’s relative unimportance “In the fathomless heat of our dwarfdom ”

Towards the end of his life Earle Birney chose to call his writings not poems, but “makings” and “alphabeings.” He did so that readers might approach them without so many of the (potentially) debilitating expectations sometimes brought to poetry. According to Peter Aichinger in his book Earle Birney, Birney eschewed the label “poet,” choosing instead to refer to himself and other Canadian writers as “men of letters” or “men of images.”