Vancouver Lights | Themes
Nature
Birney's description of the relationship between nature and culture in "Vancouver Lights" is a metaphor for humanity's relationship to the universe and to history. In the first stanza the speaker, his vision "guided" by the moonless night, sees lights from the city "overleapping the seajet" and "vaulting] the shears of the inlet," metaphorically suggesting that human beings have overrun nature, that human-made things such as cities dramatically affect the ways in which we see and interact with the natural world. But nature also overruns culture, as in the second...
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