Editor's Choice
What do the bears represent in the following poem?
"Wonderful bears that walked my room all night,
Where have you gone, your sleek and fairy fur,
Your eyes' veiled and imperious light?
Brown bears as rich as mocha or as musk,
White opalescent bears whose fur stood out
Electric in the deepening dusk,
And great black bears that seemed more blue than black,
More violet than blue against the dark-
Where are you now? Upon what track
Mutter your muffled paws that used to tread
So softly, surely, up the creakless stair
While I lay listening in bed?
When did I lose you? Whose have you become?
Why do I wait and wait and never hear
Your thick nocturnal pacing in my room?
My bears, who keeps you now, in pride and fear?"
Quick answer:
Rich's use of apostrophe compresses the metaphor of the bears' appearance and actions into one symbol. It is unclear if they are real or imaginary, but they are a manifestation of her childhood power of imagination. The image may be her way of missing her own imaginative power of childhood, which she feels has been lost.
To understand what the bears mean to the author, try putting yourself in her situation. Picking up on some key words can help you locate where she was and what time it was when the bears were with her.
In the first line, the bears "walked my room at night." Their fur was "electric in the deepening dusk." They used to walk "softly, surely, up the creakless stair/ While I lay listening in bed...." They walked around, and she would hear their "thick nocturnal pacing in my room..."
But the presence of the bears walking up the stairs and around her room at night is clearly a thing of the past. When was that? And why bears? We can think of a time when bears seemed real to us, our childhood with its teddy bears. Rich is positioning the bears' actions as real instead of imaginary to accentuate the powerful...
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role that imagination plays in children.
In addition, she is speaking to the bears--the poetic device of apostrophe, direct address, often to an inanimate object or force; this accentuates their reality. Speaking to animals is a long-standing poetic tendency. The whole poem has one subject, which apparently is a symbol for something else, called "compressed metaphor." You might compare William Blake's "The Tyger," in which he addresses a tiger, asks it questions, and sustains the metaphor throughout the poem.
Rich asks the bears where they are: "Where have you gone?... Where are you now?" as one would wonder about an old friend. But then she switches into nostalgia, and the underlying message starts to emerge: "When did I lose you?... Why do I wait and never hear...."
Because the bears' appearance and actions are so precisely described, we get a clear sense that the speaker was once a child with a great imagination. That creative power may be the thing she is missing. By asking as well, "Whose have you become?... Who keeps you now?" she also seems to wonder if children today have active imaginations.
The phrase "in pride and fear" can indicate her childhood ambivalence toward imagination, acknowledging that her mind dreamed up beings that made her uncomfortable and, by extension, that being a creative child was not easy.
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