Vancouver Lights (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Birney began writing poetry in earnest after the outbreak of World War II. In a burst of creative energy he wrote many of the poems that would be included in David and Other Poems, his first collection. “Vancouver Lights” was one of these. Peter Aichinger writes that it is “one of the few poems Birney ever wrote that expresses any sort of pride or satisfaction in the human race and its accomplishments.” Aichinger believes that the poem “suggests the cyclical pattern in the affairs of men, of grand achievement followed by wretched disaster. It is an expression of pride in man’s ability to raise a Camelot at the same time that it acknowledges the probable victory of the forces of darkness in man’s spirit.” Frank Davey in Earle Birney sees “Vancouver Lights” as an indicator of Birney’s own movement away from Trotskyism and towards a sense of himself as a poet. Davey writes that “Throughout the thirties he [Birney] had seen himself ‘as a scholar, critic, Marxist, potential novelist, ’ but not as a poet.” Birney biographer Cameron Elspeth considers the poem a statement of Birney’s inherent distrust of humanity’s capacity to do good. Elspeth writes in Earle Birney: A Life that “[“Vancouver Lights”] is suffused with self-disgust, stark terror and a suspicion that man is headed for self-destruction as he pollutes and destroys the planet.” David Stouck agrees with this view, but elaborates on it, observing that according to Birney, humanity’s capacity for violence and malevolence is mirrored by nature as well. Stouck writes in Major Canadian Authors that for Birney “Nature is beautiful but frightening . [although] nature’s malevolence exists primarily in the mind of the human observer.” In a letter to critic Dorothy Livesay and quoted in Elspeth’s biography, Birney himself says about the poem that “What I want to say, though I grant I may not have said it, is something much more complicated and tenuous — that man has now reached a stage in his development in which for the first time he has created the conditions for his own destruction.”