Vancouver Lights (Criticism)

Criticism

Bruce Meyer

• Bruce Meyer is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Toronto. He has taught at several Canadian universities and is the author of three collections of poetry. In the following essay, Meyer suggests that Birney’s poem represents humankind as a Prometheus who is responsible for both his own success and his own failure. The failure threatens to destroy the whole race, but there is a faint hope for ultimate survival.

  The late Canadian literary critic, Northrop Frye, used to tell a story about Earle Birney’s poem “Vancouver Lights” and the events of one single winter evening that helped Frye, at least spiritually, through the darkest days of World War II. Just before Christmas in 1941, the prospects for Canada and Great Britain looked dim. Earlier in the month, the garrison at Hong Kong had fallen — taking with it a third of the Canadian Army, many of them University of Toronto students. The United States Pacific fleet had been mauled at Pearl Harbor. England lay devastated during the worst days of the Blitz and its gradually dwindling air force was a thin line of dogged determination that lay between the British Empire and Nazi domination. The overwhelming drain on manpower, from both the call to arms and the call to factory work had depleted the enrollment at the University of Toronto to the point where the university was about to close its doors and submit to the veil of darkness that lay across the free world.

• On that winter night shortly before Christmas in 1941, Frye gathered at Earle Birney’s apartment on Hazelton Avenue along with a group of other Canadian poets that included the Canadian poet-laureate

  E. J. Pratt, and younger voices such as Roy Daniels and A. J. M. Smith. Binrey was about to leave academic life for a tour of duty in the Canadian Army (the events of which would form the basis for his comic novel, Turvey). Pratt opened the evening by reading his poem, “The Truant,” a fantasy/satire which tells the story of how a little “three by six” foot man stands up to a huge deistic entity called “the Great Panjandrum.” Daniels and Smith chimed in with their new wartime poems. Birney then followed with a poem he had written while out West to visit friends in his home city of Vancouver the previous summer.

• “Vancouver Lights” was based on an actual experience that Birney had while climbing a mountain above the west coast metropolis. It was night time and, as Birney stared from the mountaintop down onto the city below, district by district of the city suddenly went black — the first of many wartime black outs. As Birney often later recalled during my many lunches with the poet, it “was as if I was witnessing the end of the world from the point-of-view of God in Heaven.” Birney speculated on the annihilation of the free world and what would cause, in the words of Winston Churchill, “the lights to go out” not only “all over Europe” but around the world. At the same time, Birney was struck by the idea that even in the face of total darkness and a bleak future there still exists “a will to light and life.”

  It was the final line of “Vancouver Lights,” that profound statement “there was light,” that so moved Northrop Frye. Perhaps the light had gone out of the world for the perceivable future, but the memory of it continued to exist, and that alone was signal enough of why the university should remain open and why Canada and the free world should be dedicated to the cause at hand. Like the defiant Prometheus who was bound and chained to the mountain side, Birney perceived the very heroic, yet ultimately responsible position of mankind for the sad state of affairs the world had become in the winter of 1941. For Frye, that paradox, the possibility of the world seeing its way clear of Fascism and mass destruction, was a signal of hope, albeit a faint one, that gave him the reassurance that the free world would endure.

• Some of that hope resides in the position of the persona in “Vancouver Lights.” The voice is one of an individual who finds himself lost and awed by both the splendor and the horror of the world around him. The poem begins with the phrase, “About me the night moonless wimples the mountains” as if the darkness is enveloping everything. The word “wimples” is also unique in that it signals a sense of almost cloistered withdrawal on the part of the world from the aspects of light, a humbling gesture that covers even “the mountains.” That same darkness, however, is more than a habit donned to mask the glory of earth — it is a force that “sucks at the stars,” as if to drain the very life force from the heart of the universe. The city below, still “throbbing” is treated almost as an amulet or jeweled talisman, a signal of vitality, beauty and elegance in an otherwise empty cosmos. The lamps of the city streets “webs the sable peninsula” (a reference to the fact that Vancouver is composed of five major peninsulas that jut into the Georgia Strait like five hands reaching into the sea). The diction and cadence of Birney’s descriptions of the geographic interaction between the sea and the land are very reminiscent of the descriptions utilized by E. J. Pratt in many of his sea poems such as “Silences.”

  In fact, Birney makes a subtle tribute to Pratt’s poetry in his use of the words “seajet,” “buoy,” and “shears,” and in the cadence of the three lines in stanza one that deal with the city’s venue. Also evident in the opening stanza is Birney’s love of Anglo-Saxon poetry (he was, by academic profession a medievalist, and many of his poems, such as “Anglo-Saxon Street” are written in parody of Anglo-Saxon poetry). The use of alliteration in “by bridge and buoy” underscores this very elemental “Engl-ishness” and aligns the world of “Vancouver Lights”, at least in an allusory sense, to the cold, cruel world that is depicted in such early English poems as “The Wanderer” or “The Seafarer.” The resulting staccato rhythm of the poem’s sonics is further enhanced by the ‘breaks’ or ‘rests’ within the lines where the addition of spaces creates a series of halting pauses, breathing spots, where a tentativeness enters the voice. Birney recorded this poem many times (the last recording with the percussion group Nexus shortly before his final illness) and it is evident from listening to these recordings that the pauses were intended to punctuate with silence the rhythms of the lines and, in a very Black Mountain fashion (in later editions of the poem Bir-ney removed his punctuation) to serve as points of grammatical organization. As is the case with Anglo-Saxon masterpieces, “Vancouver Lights” is intended to be an oral poem, a voice sounding in the darkness and taking up Wilfred Owen’s claim that “the purpose of poetry is to warn.”

• The opening stanza concludes with a brief description of the lighthouse: “Across [to] the firefly / haze of a ship on the gulf’s erased horizon.” What the first stanza of poem establishes is the tension between what is and all that might vanquish it. The language, for its energy and beauty of description, flirts with an overwhelmingly negative presence where the “horizon” is “erased” and the cloaking darkness that “wimples the mountains” is set to humble everything that is visible either to the eye or the spirit. The reader is told from the outset that this is a poem about fear, and about confronting the challenge of a world where possibilities are suddenly diminishing.

  The second and third stanzas of the poem attempt to trace the sequence within the cause and effect relationship that underlies that moment in history. History, in this sense, is not perceived in the Nineteenth century idiom of “progress” but as a kind of ‘spreading-out’ or European culture to the point where the problems of European culture have become the problems of the world. The years, he says, have been “feckless” and the source for the problems is “Europe’s bog.” This description of Euro-cultural growth serves to make the world a small place where even the “outpost,” that supposed safe haven on the very edge of the world is under the thumb of that darkness which emanated from the very heart of European culture. In this sense, Birney is presenting an indictment as well as an apology for his culture; the bad and the good seem so inextricably intertwined that only a ‘Promethean’ effort of distinction can separate them. In the world of “Vancouver Lights,” eschatology is a gray area; and while one is attempting to sort it out, the “primal ink” of spiritual and political darkness continues to flow. One is reminded of C. Day Lewis’s famous lines on the eve of the Second World War that mankind was confronted with the dilemma of “defending the bad against the worse.” Politically speaking, “Vancouver Lights” shares that same sense of ambivalence, a distrust of the verities of the world which the century had called into question. Birney was, during the Thirties, a committed Communist and spent almost a year and a half living with Leon Trotsky and his family in Mexico. His sense of political cynicism feeds into the poem in the subtle distrust of culture and in the tone of ambivalence in the poem’s delineation of good and evil. In this sense, “Vancouver Lights” is not a typical wartime poem. It does not offer a “rah-rah” take on events or a political “cause.” Instead, the persona takes the position of the epic observer, the voice that is both elevated and objective. The point-of-view is not of someone on one side or another in the war, but that of a besieged humanity. “We are the spark beleaguered,” he announces. The darkness that the persona faces is “the changeless night” where the end result of human suffering is the ultimate negation of death where the “black Experimentress,” perhaps fate but certainly nothingness, stares back at the observer and leaves him with an acute sense of littleness and Kierkegaardian angst. Even the sun, that eternal source of light (associated since Classical times with Phoebus Apollo, the god of light and learning) is but a “bubble” on the side of the “Experi-mentress,” and the endless night, “the Nubian” dwarfs the tiny sparks of possibility in the cosmos by wearing the stars as a “necklace of Nebulae.”

• What remains for mankind among all these shards of light and dying sparks, is the determination to articulate itself into existence. “Yet we must speak” is a declaration that there is a divine spark in mankind, an animate and life-affirming force, that cannot be snuffed out. Just as Prometheus stole the gift of fire from the gods, so mankind is driven [by] the scintillation, the energy, to confirm and re-confirm “our will.” What mankind has made, beyond culture, beyond politics and beyond civilization, is an on-going pact with himself to exist: “we conjured these flames.” What is important regardless “if the murk devour and none weave again in gossamer” is that mankind has sent a signal to the cosmos that “there was light” and that “these rays were ours,” as if the dimming lights of the city were affirmations of the marvel of humanity and footprints left on a dark beach even as the tide comes in. In a statement that would be sounded by the likes of William Faulkner in his Nobel speech, Bir-ney sees mankind as the master of its own fate, where the decision to exist or to cease rests solely in its own will: “No one bound Prometheus Himself he chained / and consumed his own bright liver.” Many critics of Birney’s have pointed out that the phrase “the blast that snuffed us” is eerily prophetic and foreshadows the coming of the atomic bomb and the nuclear age. What Birney did acknowledge is that he feared that mankind was on the verge of annihilating itself and that he sought to produce a poem that would warn while offering the choice between existence and destruction.

  The final line, “there was light,” reverberates with the tone of ambivalence that is carried throughout the poem. There was light. Will there be light again? What does the light say and to whom? As much as the final statement is a conclusion, it is not a conclusion — it is the presentation of a future thesis; yet it is the open-endedness of the statement that offers a sense of hope. It was this sense of hope that Northrop Frye acknowledged that night in Birney’s apartment on Hazel-ton Avenue. What Frye saw was not the fear in the persona’s words, but the presence of possibilities past, present and future, that even if the light should go out of the world, there had been enough of it, particle traces floating through the universe, to suggest that what was here was meaningful, alive and worth preserving.

• Source: Bruce Meyer, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

Chris Semansky

Chris Semansky’s poetry, essays, and stories appear regularly in literary magazines and journals. In the following essay, Semansky explores

• “Figuring human beings as worms and insects (spiders weave gossamer webs) makes sense in that both create worlds out of themselves, the former reproducing itself, the latter spinning its own abode. But they are also sub- human species and hence underscore humanity’s own insignificance in relation to the universe and history itself.”
• how Birney uses the imagery of light and darkness in “Vancouver Lights” to question and comment on the meaning of human existence.

  For most of his life Earle Birney was a relentless traveler and seeker of new experiences, concerned as much with the processes of becoming as he was with the work of being. Raised on the outskirts of the Canadian wilderness, Birney was also acutely attuned to nature and its processes. His best poems embrace both his passion for exploration of life’s meaning and his experience with the natural world. “Vancouver Lights,” included in David and Other Poems, his first collection, is one such poem. In it, Birney uses light and darkness in their various and varied forms as its central metaphoric images, allowing him to meditate on the relationships between insight and vision, between how we see the physical world and what sense we make of it. Birney’s typographic use of space itself also underscores the poem’s preoccupation with seeing.

  We are introduced to light and darkness in the first stanza. Darkness is the province of space and has the capacity to alter the natural world for the speaker. The night “wraps ocean land air” and “sucks at the stars.” Birney takes up the impersonal but ominously omnivorous quality of darkness later in the poem but here it serves as the backdrop which enables the speaker to see light as well. For without the darkness, the speaker would be unable to witness “The city throbbing below.” In this stanza it is light which, underscoring the poems mythic theme of good versus evil, fights against the darkness. The speaker sees “strands” of it which “falter and halt,” and through a “firefly / haze” spies the “lambent spokes of a lighthouse.” The thinness and attenuated nature of the light he describes is apropos for what they signify: humanity’s striving in the dark for meaning. This striving occurs, as Birney tells us in the second stanza, “Through the feckless years,” underscoring the inherent futility of human effort. The light in this stanza similarly has a temporal quality to it. The city’s lights are described as a “quilt of lamps” (lamps are lighted and go out) and the city itself as a “winking / outpost.” Darkness is the constant, Birney implies, the backdrop of time and existence itself, the natural state to which all things and beings eventually revert. Again, he figures darkness as a consuming force, this time in the guise of the oceans, which threaten civilization, as represented by the Canadian city of Halifax, located in Nova Scotia on the country’s east coast. The “primal ink,” another form of darkness, here represents the world’s many wars and conflicts at this time. Its “flooding” highlights the ways in which these wars are spilling and threatening to spill over onto every continent. In his 1971 work Earle Birney, Richard Robillard writes that “This section suggests the question: Can we, having lived through careless, thoughtless, spiritless years, read the message of the ‘primal ink’? The great irony is, of course, that there is little whiteness or brightness to set off the message: the ink floods almost the whole page.”

• Birney emphasizes the constancy of the dark in the third stanza where — in its incarnation as night — he describes it as “changeless,” yet “pulsing,” a kind of symbolic blood in which even planets are shown to be “fragile,” presumably because they too will succumb to time. In this “atmosphere” Birney locates humanity as “a spark beleagured / by darkness.” The paradox and the irony is that the very thing which gives birth to the light is responsible for its death. The symbol of light representing deity and life and darkness representing evil and death is universal. In this vein the speaker’s question — “how shall we utter our fear that the black Experimentress / will never in the range of her microscope find it?” — can also be read as an implicit death wish, for to be found surely means to be devoured, blotted out. Even Phoebus Apollo, the Sun God, does not stand a chance against darkness; he is merely “a bubble that dries on Her slide.” Calling darkness an “Experimentress” also underscores an intentionality behind it, a force which is merely playing, “experimenting,” and that humanity falls within the scope of the potential subjects on which she experiments. Birney’s biographer Elspeth Cameron believed that after Birney lost faith in Trotsky, who epitomized for him the “visionary male leader,” “What was left was the principle of female power represented not by humanist vision but by scientific investigation.”

  The encroaching darkness is no reason, however, for humanity not to try, not to voice its place in the darkness. In the fourth stanza, the speaker, building on his own identity as a representative spokesman for humanity, insists on this, suggesting even that language itself, in the form of speech, is a form of salvation, of hope.

    Yet we must speak we the unique glowworms
    Out of the waters and rocks of our little world
    we conjured these flames hooped these sparks
    by our will From blankness and cold we fashioned
        stars
    to our size and signalled Aldebaran
    This must we say whoever may be to hear us
    if murk devour and none weave again in gossamer:
    These rays were ours
    we made and unmade them Not the shudder of
        continents
    doused us the moon’s passion nor crash of comets
    In the fathomless heat of our dwarfdom our
        dream’s combustion
    we contrived the power the blast that snuffed us
    No one bound Prometheus Himself he chained
    and consumed his own bright liver O stranger
    Plutonian descendant or beast in the stretching
        night-
    there was light
• Describing humanity as “unique glowworms” is apt, as the poem returns again and again to the claim that humanity has created itself, and so is responsible for its own condition. Figuring human beings as worms and insects (spiders weave gossamer webs) makes sense in that both create worlds out of themselves, the former reproducing itself, the latter spinning its own abode. But they are also sub-human species and hence underscore humanity’s own insignificance in relation to the universe and history itself.

  Humanity contains both the forces of light and the forces of darkness, Birney suggests. We can either choose to live or choose to destroy ourselves: “We contrived the power the blast that snuffed us”, he says. The “black Experimentress” did not incite man to make war; it was “Not the shudder of continents / the moon’s passion nor crash of comets”, but man himself who makes and unmakes his own light. In Major Canadian Authors David Stouck observes that “Humankind’s capacity to create light is threatened by a primal instinct for violence and destruction.” If indeed these forces are built into human beings, as the poem implies, then the speaker’s insistence that humanity has created its own mess because it chose to is a contradiction at best, disingenuous at worse. The lines make more sense if we see it as a contradiction. In this way Birney’s probing examination of humanity’s drive to both destroy and save itself is echoed in the poem’s own logic, something of which the writer may or may not be aware. As if to emphasize the (apparently) irresolvable nature of the conflict, the poem juxtaposes Pluto and Prometheus in the last stanza, again foregrounding the mythic battle between light and darkness, this time in the figures of the god of fire and the god of the underworld. The poem ends with an image of light, echoing the light of Genesis at the beginning of the world. The prophetic tone of these last lines in particular and of the entire poem in general, position the speaker as a kind of demi-god who has also has the power to create and destroy the world through his words.

• Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

  What Do I Read Next?

  • Frank Davey’s Earle Birney provides a solid and succinct introduction to the life and writings of the Canadian poet.
  • In 1967 M. L. Rosenthal published The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II. This critical study describes many of the movements and individuals who have helped define landscape of poetry written in the English-speaking world in the last half of the twentieth century.
  • David Stouck’s Major Canadian Authors, published in 1984, provides a comprehensive introduction to the life and works of seventeen Canadian authors from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Stouck locates the work of these writers in the context of both regional and world literature.
  • Out of the Shadows: Canada in the Second World War, a 1995 study by William A. B. Douglas and Brereton Greenhous, explores the contributions and sacrifices of Canada during World War II.
  • Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre, published in 1988 and edited by Walter Kaufmann, provides a strong introduction to some of the more prominent existentialist thinkers throughout history.