I

It is the problem of affirmation within the ironic mode which has concerned Earle Birney the poet, as the problem of humanity in an apocalyptic age has concerned Birney the man. Both problems, literary and social, were approached in Birney's doctoral dissertation, “Chaucer's Irony.” Completed in 1936, the dissertation demonstrated a profound understanding of irony, and of its relationship to a writer's society. Birney argued that Chaucer's irony reflected his “ambiguous class position,” between a “responsive interest in the new vigorous world of the bourgeois, and his economic and social need to reconcile that interest with the duties of a courtier.”¹ The dissertation was informed by this definition of irony:

… in all uses of the word to-day, there is this unity of meaning: an illusion has been created that a real incongruity or conflict is non-existent, and the illusion has been so shaped that a bystander may, immediately or ultimately, see through it and be thereby surprised into a more vivid awareness of that very conflict.²

The ironist, Birney said,

is a man who chooses, for various reasons, to make a show of concealing his satiric thrusts. … The ironist succeeds, by his indirectness, not so much in softening the blow—often quite the contrary—but in removing himself from clear responsibility for the attack. It follows that … when society is sharply divided against itself, as during the height of the feudal-bourgeois struggle, there is little room for the ironist or even for the satirist as such. But in epochs which lead up to or away from the primary social struggles, epochs of transition in which contradictions are most glaring but not immediately in battle, the ironist has his day.

(“CI,” I, i, 2)

Birney posited the necessity or propriety of irony at the transition stage of a class struggle. He also insisted that “… irony is inescapably a critical emphasis upon disparity and, so, one form of ‘satire’ …” (“CI,” I, i, 31-32). Thus, he implied that commitment and detachment both are necessary to the ironist. And, in poetic practice at least, this resolved any conflict over the moral value of irony as compared to statement.

Whatever the importance of such a conflict for Chaucer the fourteenth-century courtier, it was certainly real for Birney the twentieth-century Marxist organizer and journalist; and real, too, was the felt necessity for the concealment of irony in the face of growing war propaganda.³ “Chaucer's Irony” may be read as Birney's own rationale for irony, for the kind of sophisticated and subtle poetry which he began to publish immediately after presenting his dissertation. Not long thereafter, Birney's active involvement in radical politics declined, and the approach of world war was an important catalyst in this change.⁴ I infer disillusionment: the loss of that sustaining faith, which any honest radical activist must have, in some sort of millenium-on-earth. And, if this was the case, then the cause of Birney's disillusion was simply the approach of Armageddon, demonstrating on a frightening scale man's inhumanity. The question, perhaps, was not whether millennium, but whether survival.

What Birney perhaps gained from disillusion was the necessary “‘poise’” (“CI,” I, i, 42) for irony, the necessary detachment which allowed him to be artistically committed. Thus was human affirmation hidden in disillusion. Its discovery is a pattern repeated over and over again in Birney's poems, in which affirmation springs, and springs only, from genuine despair of the human condition.

We may say of Birney, as he said of Chaucer, that his age and circumstance combined to produce in him “a permanent dualism” (“CI,” I, v, 62). Affirmation and irony, commitment and detachment, coexist throughout Birney's poetry. His myriad forms, his constant revision, his control of technique, all reflect the conscious craftsman's search for ways to allow their coexistence. This search for form has led Birney away from his early collective and public poetry toward poems more individual and romantic. Within this formal development, however, Birney's ironic, yet affirmative, stance remains constant.

II

Irony is an important aspect of Birney's earliest poetry. Even “Slug in Woods,” written in 1928 and first published in 1937,⁵ which is apparently a poem of simple nature description, is ironic in Birney's sense of the term. There is in it a conflict or incongruity which the poem's wit and craft combine to hide and reveal. The dichotomy in “Slug in Woods” is between different scales of time, and finally between time itself (the world of change and death) and the notion of eternity (a world out of time). The poem's first lines,

For eyes he waves greentipped
taut horns of slime                    …

embody an image of seaweed, and introduce an extended and subliminal metaphor of the forest floor as seabed. This metaphor works to at least four ends. Firstly, it distorts perspective so that what is realistically one small patch of woods becomes part of an “illim- / itable seafloor,” part of a macrocosmic as well as a microcosmic world. Secondly, it suggests slow motion, since movement in water is slower than in air. Thirdly, it implies an above-sea perspective, existing in “dappled air,” which is known to the speaker and the reader but not to the slug. Fourthly, it suggests an evolutionary time-scale. In light of Birney's later poems, we must see this bit of forest, through which the slug swims, and which is located near Crescent Beach, as Birney's familiar stage for man: between the evolutionary sea and slime and the high land of consciousness and power,⁶ here, ironically, the same place.

In the succeeding lines, the poem's time-scale becomes more ambiguous:

                                                            They dipped
hours back                    across a reef
a salmonberry leaf
then strained to grope past fin
of spruce                    …

These “hours” suggest a tiny time-scale opposite the vast evolutionary one. Yet the slug's world, because of his size and speed, is even more infinite than ours. So the poem presents a complicated relativity of time: unfixed to the slug's scale, the human's, or the universe's.

At this point in the poem, its perspective subtly begins to change. At first, the persona of the poem speaks of a particular slug as it moves. Then,

                                                            Stilled
is he
Hours on                    he will resume
his silver scrawl                    …

Meanwhile, the speaker pauses to generalize and predict, his language becomes appropriately more metaphoric, and he visualizes the fate of the slug:

                                                            Slim
young jay his sudden shark
The wrecks he skirts are dark
and fungussed firlogs                    …

What threatens the slug's eternal, chancy “scrawl” is death. It is the wreck we all try to skirt, but which in fact is our guidepost, is what prevents the relativity of time. Heaven may be foretold by “mounting boles,” but “… isles in dappled air” are “fathoms above his care.”

Birney's definition of irony as indirect satire accounts for the slight tonal variation of the next two lines. The speaker's point of view has become slightly more distant, and there is a distinct sense of looking down on a form of life so lifeless as to be disgusting:

Azygous muted life
himself his viscid wife

The speaker gradually separates himself from his subject and the poem's point of view becomes that of the gods. But, in his dissertation, Birney saw the “irony of fate” as merely a form of dramatic irony, where the gods are the audience whose knowledge is withheld from the character on-stage, that is, mankind (“CI,” I, i, 9). Thus, if the speaker has become a god, the slug represents man. But the poet and the poem's readers are also mere men. So the poem reveals a real incongruity in man's view of himself. The last lines of the poem make it clear, however, that it is the identity, the shared fate of man and slug, which is important. These lines allow relief and realization as they escape from the tight rhymed trimeter couplets, which have slowed the reader's progress throughout, and become full pentameters:

foodward he noses cold beneath his sea
So spends a summer's jasper century

The last line is a new sentence. So it does not refer merely to the slug, but also to the watcher, the speaker, who realizes that his seemingly endless summer is spending too. For man, time is defined by death; evolution from sea to land is relevant only to a time-scale longer than the individual's, and in fact proceeds also by death; life is realized to be as tiny, persistent, beautiful, and oppressive as the atmosphere of this poem suggests. “Slug in Woods” shows the falsity of a detached and godlike view of life. By implication, commitment is also required, and the poem hints that the commitment is bound up with a view of life that encompasses the fact of death.

As T. D. MacLulich has demonstrated, Birney's early and famous poem “David” (I, 107-13) deals with the initiation of its protagonist “into an awareness of death. He has learned that death is not something which can be kept from consciousness but is an unavoidable and even essential part of life.”⁷ David and Bob, taken together, represent the process of initiation into experience, in which an old self must die and a new self be born. David's false view of man in perfect harmony with nature must be destroyed, and Bob must learn that nature is indifferent, that man is by his own consciousness forever separated from Eden. This is painful and guilty knowledge, but by choosing it, Bob acquiesces in his own humanity, which is potentially spiritual, and rejects as impossible a purely physical existence. The poem's more obvious conflicts—between men and mountains, and over the question of mercy killing—and its deceptively joyful personification of nature, are techniques of ironic masking which cover and yet expose the poem's real conflict.

Another early Birney poem, “Hands” (I, 67-68), begins in the world of guilt and despair in which “David” ended. “Hands” expresses the pain, but also the necessity, of action in the lapsarian world where man is primarily separate from nature. The poem's penultimate line—“We are not of these woods we are not of these woods”—is a chanted lament, but also a ritual exorcism of guilt and a hopeful realization. Exactly because man is not part of the unthinking silent process of nature, he has the power to visualize and, therefore, change his world. This is the hidden affirmation of a poem which otherwise despairs.

In “Vancouver Lights” (I, 71-72), on the other hand, affirmation becomes overt: Birney uses techniques of irony to reject the tragic and express an heroic vision of the potential of man. “Vancouver Lights” rejects the concept of fate and, therefore, posits man as the only god there is. The primary irony of the poem, in Birney's sense of concealed conflict, is discoverable in its last line. “there was light” is from the account of creation in Genesis, from God's word. But, here, the words are placed in the mouth of man and the conclusion is inescapable. Concealed in the poem's apparent conflict between man and the gods is a real conflict within man himself—only discoverable when man realizes he has invented his gods and is himself the ultimate power for good or evil. The poem's basic symbolism—light versus dark (which also echoes the biblical creation myth)—represents a false conflict hiding a real one; the conflict is really within light, within man. Prometheus, too (half-man, half-god, and light-bringer), is here to embody this real conflict.

The persona, atop his mountain above the lights of Vancouver, is placed exactly where the poem's theme suggests he should be: between the finite and the infinite, between light and dark, heaven and earth. In setting up his contrast between the lighted city and the vast darkness of space, Birney dramatizes it. Each force is active: the night “wimples” (which means to fold or rumple or to cover), it “wraps,” and “mounting / sucks.” Light from the city is “throbbing,” it “webs … golden / strands” which “… overleap … vault,” and “climb.” In this way Birney both conceals and reveals the basic unity of light and dark, in order to expose the genuine conflict between varieties of light. His persona, placed between two kinetic and apparently opposing forces, seems to separate them. But, in fact, it is toward him that each must move, because in him is their unity.

As the lights coming up the mountain “falter and halt”—echoing that more cataclysmic halting of light with which the poem deals—the poet skillfully subsumes the activity of his opposing forces in the perspective of time, using the image of a wheel of light to indicate the rolling of the years:

                                                                                                    Across to the firefly
haze of a ship on the gulf's erased horizon
roll the lambent spokes of a lighthouse
Through the feckless years we have come to the time
when to look on this quilt of lamps is a troubling delight

In the second verse-paragraph, the poem moves swiftly to the specific in time and place. But the World War II blackout, which the persona envisions as flooding the world, is also a resumption of the cosmic night which “mounting / suck[ed] at the stars” in the first paragraph. Now, though, there is the crucial difference that this is man's darkness. So there is set up an ironic unity between the darkness man creates and the chaotic darkness of the non-human universe. But a further ironic qualification is added by the phrase “primal ink,” which suggests that, even in creating darkness, man acts out of the impulse to communicate. If “ink” floods all, the inkwell has perhaps been irretrievably overturned, but the roots of darkness and light are again implied to be one.

Verse-paragraph three names the emotion which the “flooding … primal ink” has evoked—terror. At the same time it provides a clue to understanding that fear's meaning:

On this mountain's brutish forehead with terror of space
I stir                    …

The “brutish” mountain seems at first glance to be an obtrusive and rather mundane personification of a mere mountain—mere, that is, in the cosmic perspective of the poem. It strikes a false note; but perhaps it is intended to because the personification of the cosmos is to follow, and we must be made to see this latter personification for what it is—man's device, and an essentially false one. The “terror of space” embodies two fears: the fear of nature and the cosmos as utterly alien and unassimilable, and yet, paradoxically, the fear that nature is not merely indifferent but actively malicious: “pulsing down from beyond and between / the fragile planets.” These fears are related:

how shall we utter our fear that the black Experimentress
will never in the range of her microscope find it?                    …

The terror of indifference and meaninglessness here evokes the desire for an animate universe, for gods who may be malicious but who will at least exist. Personification here is the literary equivalent of man's desire to create gods so he may believe he dwells in a fated and tragic universe. Thus, man avoids the terrible knowledge of humanity's total responsibility for itself, avoids assuming that responsibility, and thus, he is in grave danger of imminent self-destruction.

Richard Robillard has pointed out what he calls the “submerged metaphor of the spider”⁸ in “Vancouver Lights.” This metaphor primarily represents man's creative power. But there may also be the suggestion that the “webs” of light men “weave … in gossamer” are webs of fate; man spinning his own destruction out of himself. The poem in fact treats man as perhaps already hopelessly trapped in his own web. Birney calls the work “a sort of letter-poem to the future, in hope there would still be someone in it who could, and would, read me” (CJ, p. 82). But the poem speaks of man as already extinguished—“These rays were ours.” In the earliest versions of the poem, the fourth-last line read “No one slew Prometheus,” implying that he killed himself.⁹ The poem also speaks of “the blast that snuffed us.” Yet it is this very assumption of apocalypse, when we realize it to be caused by man, which can activate the positive facet of man's paradoxical hubris. If man can destroy, he can create:

Yet we must speak
we conjured these flames                    hooped these sparks
by our will                    From blankness and cold we fashioned stars
to our size                    and signalled Aldebaran

To communicate and create from “our dream's combustion” is also our destiny and nature. In this perspective, we see that our created gods must be false; man is the creator; man is god. The courage to affirm involves the assumption of this responsibility for creation and, therefore, also for the risk of destruction. Man's heroism lies in this courage, the courage to create his own fate.

The relationship between the stand taken in “Vancouver Lights” and Birney's ideas about the impossibility of detachment, and about the irony-of-fate as dramatic irony writ large, is clear. Fate is a dramatist's trick; the poem invokes the notion to squash it. It should also be clear that Birney has not used irony to avoid commitment, but to construct for it a profound rationale. It is the threat of apocalypse which forces man to confront the radical fact of his alienation from the universe. This confrontation, because it is the only means of survival, provides grounds for affirmation—affirmation which in this poem rises to the heroic.

“Vancouver Lights” employs a first-person persona, but it is Birney's “cosmic I,” the speaker as the conscious representative of mankind. Birney has been criticized for this tendency and has himself expressed doubts about this “rhetorical” stage of his writing (CJ, pp. 82-83). It is certainly the case that a new Birney persona was to develop, less didactic, more human and attractive in many ways. But in this poem, at least, the “cosmic I” is justified, indeed, demanded. “Vancouver Lights” sets out to demolish false gods and raise man to their heroic level in the cause of the species' survival. What but the cosmic would do?

III

The new poems which Birney published in Now is Time (1945), Strait of Anian (1948), and Trial of a City (1952) continued to explore and refine the themes of those in his first book. But a stylistic change was underway, a change which emerged clearly in the poems first gathered in Ice Cod Bell or Stone (1962) and Near False Creek Mouth (1964). Most of these poems are set in other countries. On the whole, they are more relaxed and conversational in tone, with less emphasis on such structural devices as extended metaphor and regular stanza or rhyme forms. Most punctuation is abandoned and replaced with spaces. This latter change is part of a generally increased emphasis on the visual appearance of the poems, which is one of the ways Birney structures his work in the absence of more traditional devices.

Birney has said that his increased concern with visual form is partly an attempt to notate more precisely a poem's sound values.¹⁰ Therefore it is logical that the poet's personal “voice” is more apparent and important in these poems. In this sense and others, Birney is now recognizable “inside” his poems; in Al Purdy's words, “The situation and feeling have become personal.”¹¹ But the Birney displayed in these poems is still a persona. This Birney's words and actions are as calculated and controlled—though never overtly—as the impersonal personae of his earliest poems. What is, in fact, new about these poems is their focus on relatively unimportant and casual incidents, whose meaning is worked out in individual terms. All of this implies poems which create characters and utilize incidents: poems, that is, which are to some extent dramatic. Therefore, this shift of tone, while it appears to bring, and no doubt sometimes does bring the reader closer to the personality of the poet, is paradoxically also a distancing device. It should then come as no surprise that Birney's ironic method remains, though his techniques of irony have modified. What changes least, perhaps, is Birney's basic thematic stance. His poems still confront an apocalyptic world in order to affirm life.

“A Walk in Kyoto” (II, 32-33), is one of the poems in which Birney appears in the guise of what has been called his tourist persona,¹² consciously searching for meaning in the sights he sees, and for communication with the people he meets. This persona serves primarily as a device for an exploration of alienation. Birney says, of “A Walk in Kyoto,”

On one level, I feel it to be a record of a day's half-conscious hunting for a bridge of identity between my raw Canadian self and the subtle complexities of Japan's ancient capital, Kyoto.

(CJ, p. 96)

There is the implication here, not to be taken lightly, of the existence of other levels. There are also clues to those deeper understandings. In dramatizing his search, Birney has made it a good deal more than “half-conscious” (emphasis added): “where,” he asks, “can the simple song of a man be heard?” and he later enquires, “is this the Days one parable”? The poem is explicitly structured in the form of a tour “to walk [him] back into … brotherhood.”¹³ But Birney's alienation is more than tourist-deep. It is a psychological truism that the alienation of one human being from another is a result of alienation within oneself. Birney's “raw Canadian self” is present certainly in “A Walk in Kyoto,” but we are only aware of this because there is another Birney self, anything but raw, standing beside the first and constantly telling us about him. This is the essential feature of Birney's tourist persona. There is, of course, a third Birney, the craftsman who later shapes a real experience into poetic fiction. But this Birney is not, as the first two are, a “presence” in the poem.

The real conflict which Birney's art hides in “A Walk in Kyoto” (for purposes of more effective delayed revelation), is that between Birney's two selves. The means of hiding this conflict is the poem's seemingly single-minded, almost self-conscious quest for a link between Birney and the society he is visiting.

When Birney's inn-maid tells him “all week … / … is Boys Day / also please Mans Day …,” we may recognize the third Birney's sharp ear capturing some charming inflectional variations on the Queen's English. But basically, we are hearing what the tourist Birney heard. However, when he then asks, “… the magnolia sprig in my alcove / is it male …”? Birney is talking to himself. This happens throughout the poem and Birney's second self not only talks to his first in the form of musings and questions, but he pictures him:

                                                                                …                    i stand hunched
and clueless                    like a castaway in the shoals of my room

The slightly ridiculous picture the second Birney gives us of the first sometimes amounts to humorous self-deprecation, as when Birney describes the “… carp that flail … for the crumb this non-fish tossed.” This dichotomy between Birney's two selves is the dramatic representation of his alienation, and this alienation is the source of his need to seek an outward link. The poem thus dramatizes both an inner and an outer separation. The poem must be formally self-conscious in its quest because it deals precisely with an excessive consciousness of self. It follows that the moment of unity which Birney finds at the end of the poem is necessarily also an integration of himself. Such an integration is represented by the unselfconscious nature of the last few lines, where both Birney's selves have coalesced:

tall in the bare sky & huge as Gulliver
a carp is rising                    golden & fighting
thrusting its paper body up from the fist
of a small boy on an empty roof                    higher
& higher                    into the endless winds of the world

The poem has, in effect, moved beyond irony.

If the poem's final moment of brotherhood and unity works for the reader, it is because the images and symbols in its final lines carry with them a wealth of meaning accumulated throughout a poem dense as it is brief. In 1958, Japan was still reacting to its defeat, which was, in part, also a defeat of traditional Japan. In the poem we are introduced early to this fact through the maid's “small bowed body of an empire.” The flavour of that rapid westernization which was such a striking fact about post-war Japan is everywhere part of the poem:

                                                  … streets looking much as everywhere
men are pulled past on the strings
of their engines                    the legs of Boys
are revolved by a thousand pedals
& all the faces are taut & unfestive as Moscow's
or Toronto's                    or mine

Ironically, Birney here already has a link with the people of Japan, in that urban existence which is a mark of the modern world and which is practically synonymous with alienation as a phenomenon. The poem frequently contrasts modern and traditional Japan. The “penned carp,” in a frightening image of urban crowding and greed, “flail / on each others backs” next to the “Important Cultural Property.” This conflict of old and new is symptomatic of Japanese westernization: they too have been alienated, to whatever extent, from the very cultural traditions which are baffling Birney.

The poem presents several suggestions of uncertain sexual identity as part of a larger theme of identity. Birney isn't sure about the gender of his magnolia; in the Japanese theatre men play women and vice versa; and Birney points out an “hermaphrodite” Buddha. A second and eventually related concern of the poem is communication and the lack of it. The poem opens with the maid's cryptic revelation, but Birney is “clueless”; the gardens are “framed & untouchable”; Birney hears the vigor of the city “but the pitch is high”; meanwhile the alleys are

                                                  … jammed with competing waves
of signs in two tongues & three scripts

but nowhere “the simple song of a man.” Birney describes the Buddha as “500 tons / of hermaphrodite Word,” thereby linking the themes of sexual identity and communication in this last image before the poem's resolution. The Buddha is a symbol here of sexual identity achieved or transcended; and “Word,” suggesting communication of the incommunicable, forecasts a transcendence of the barriers of self in non-verbal communication.

The poem's final lines invoke all of these themes and others. They sum up a series of allusions to Gulliver's Travels. If the kite, in Birney's eyes, is “huge as Gulliver,” then his reduction at last to Japanese size is implied. The final lines incorporate, too, an ironic reversal: in verse-paragraph two, the men were pulled by “the strings / of their engines” and the boys' feet were being pedalled. Here, the boy is in control of the string. The phallic nature of the kite-image is obvious, and the carp is also a Japanese virility-symbol: “a carp is rising golden & fighting / thrusting its paper body up from the fist.” Thus both Birney's “phallic western eye” and the maid's “discrete” one can appreciate and share its meaning. The kite-carp, unlike those Birney saw “penned” earlier, is free and individual in its “fighting”—individual not in the sense of fighting others of its species but of fighting to ascend, to conquer its own limitations.

The poem's last line attempts to move it beyond the bounds of individual brotherhood and into the international sphere. This, for me, does not quite work; it becomes rhetorical. The reason lies, I believe, in the lack of preparation previously in the poem for an image of wind.

The Birney of “A Walk in Kyoto” is no longer entirely the same Birney who sought in his early poems to make himself and his readers aware of the world of apocalypse and death which lurks not outside but inside man. His message was that man is free to create or destroy and, therefore, responsible to choose and act. This view is still central to Birney's poetry. But he has moved on to confront in this poem, not the necessity of brotherhood, but its practice. The means to brotherhood must necessarily bring a consideration not of man but of men. His dialectic of detachment and commitment now works itself out on the individual level, but obviously he has not abandoned the large view or his explicitly social concerns.

“A Walk in Kyoto” records an experience of alienation, followed by a moment in which Birney experiences wholeness within himself, and, therefore, a meaningful connection with his surroundings. “Bangkok Boy” (II, 34-36) deals only with such a moment—expanding it to fill the poem. Therefore, though the persona is a tourist and recognizably Birney, there is only a faint suggestion of the self-conscious persona of the other poem.

“Bangkok Boy” is concerned, then, with a moment out of time, a moment of “coexistence of past, present and future.”¹⁴ But this moment is merely a stage for the presentation of deeper ironies. Birney's chief ironic technique in the poem is to create a formal gap between the dancing boy and the watching tourist. This is done visually by the clear separation, on the page, of Birney's description of the boy from his thoughts about him, and orally by the use of contrasting styles in each separate part. Paradoxically, one effect of the formal separation is to parallel man and boy. For this moment, each of them has stepped out of his milieu, out of his tradition and destiny: the persona can identify with the child's dance, and in this way experience a feeling of unity with him. This identification with the dance is the dominant feeling by the end of the poem. However, identification in turn serves to mask a deeper separation between boy and man which the poem only implies. This separation involves a conflict between innocence and experience, between the watcher's knowledge of the value of this free moment in the young boy's life—a moment such as the tourist can never again experience himself—and the boy's simple being, a state which can experience but cannot know. His moment of dance is thus both exhilarating and tragic; exhilarating in its freedom, tragic in light of Birney's knowledge of the boy's inevitable future. The poem, in jazz-dance rhythm, becomes Birney's own affirming moment of creation in the face of this knowledge. But it becomes also a plea to the boy and a prayer to himself that such creation may continue to exist.

The dance is central in “Bangkok Boy.” It is a symbol for humans caught and catching, for freedom expressed in the jaws of necessity. The poem's first lines hint that the need to dance is as much the necessary result of hot pavement on small bare feet as of boyish glee:

On the hot
cobbles hoppity
he makes a jig up

But environmental necessity is transformed into a triumph over environment by the activity of making up, creating a dance. Creativity is the link between Birney and the boy.

The “hot / cobbles” serve to link the boy's dance to the sun, which in this poem symbolizes knowledge (and, therefore, corruption), fatherhood (and, therefore, tradition), as well as youthful energy. Thus, the sun on the paving stones becomes a representation of the real economic and cultural necessities trapping the boy

dancing under the sun
                    that dances
                    over the toy king's
                    claw roofed palace
                    and blazes the roof
                    above the latest Hong Kong girlies
                    imported to strip
                    to the beat of copulation
                    and shimmers the broken-china towers
                    where ten thousand Buddhas
                    sit forever
                    on other boys' ashes

As we turn back to the boy, he is “In his own time,”

on the scene's edge
like a small monkey-
man
in the endless Ramayana fresco

The Ramayana is an epic myth-poem, the “life of Rama,” familiar to many Asian cultures. But the boy is at the fresco's “edge,” for this moment off-centre, and out of step with his culture. Birney also, it is important to see, is not part of the horde of tourists. Not only does he spend some time describing them, thus implying separation, but he describes himself as a “strayed / tourist.” Both Birney and the boy are temporarily out of their assigned roles, seizing a moment.

The other tourists who “… worship / in a regalia / of cameras,” are caught in a ritual, in which the pictures they take, “to immortalize” the carved temples, are examples of a stilling of time which is uncreative. The section is a fine evocation of a dance in which all are dancing to one grotesque tune: the formal culture of Thailand and the formal tourist rituals each reinforcing the other, the tourists

… splaying
to immortalize
the splayed gyrations
of temple dancers

Another formal parallel of the poem is important. As the first indented section was a vision of the world in which the boy will inevitably be caught, so the second such section is the world to which Birney, temporarily “strayed,” must soon return. So his description of the boy next begins to have the flavour of a plea:

Beat out
brown smallfry
beat out your own
wild
jive

The plea is as much against Birney's own return to the world-in-time as against the boy's. The third indented section, written in the third person, neatly manages to suggest Birney's own motions of return to his tourist role through the eyes of the boy. Thus, for a moment, Birney shares the boy's perspective, is able to see himself as he is seen:

he vanishes
in the fearful tempo of a taxi
to that spireless palace
where god-tall
in their chalked goblin-faces
all tourists return

In the fate of “all” tourists is the fate both of boy and man, who may only remain temporarily at the edge of “that frozen fresco.” Birney's “bare hotel pool” and “funeral music” are everyone's death. But for “this dazzled instant” all those powers waiting to catch the boy are themselves caught:

… your father's big
Buddha smile
and all the high
world bang in tune
the bright
sun caught
cool

The next indentation makes clear the boy's and a whole class's fate: a hell of disease and toil. Now the plea becomes a supplication, a prayer that the poet and the boy may dance in the face of death. The pun on Thai, “tie,” indicating unity, is presumably intentional:

Scamper little Thai
hot on these hot stones
scat
leap
this is forever O for
all gods' sakes
beat out
that first
last
cry of joy
under the sun!

In Birney's thoughts, the boy dances now for the sake of all the gods: the “god-tall” tourist, and the boy's own clumping deities: economic, social, cultural. He dances, as the poem dances, to “beat out” the fires that threaten to consume us. The dance is an instant which, for the boy, will have to last for ever, because there will likely not be another. But the poem and dance are “forever”: evidence that man, caught as he must be in the world's dance, can make it nevertheless a “cry of joy.”

Not joy, however, but mere survival, in this post-atomic and pre-galactic age is all the affirmation offered in “November Walk near False Creek Mouth” (II, 43-51). Returning twenty years later to the scene of “Vancouver Lights,” Birney again becomes a fulcrum between man's world and the universe. It is wholly in keeping with the personal and informal style which he has now evolved that Birney is no longer atop Grouse Mountain; rather he takes a meandering November walk on the beach below. Apocalypse still threatens, but where Birney spoke, in the earlier poem, for a beleaguered humanity and adopted a “cosmic I” to defy the cosmos, his posture is now quietly individual. There is none of the ironic self-consciousness of Birney's tourist persona. What is perhaps most significant about the persona of this poem is his quietly despairing and yet accepting mood. This mood permeates the poem, unifies it, and makes its temporal setting more than external. The poem's autumnal feeling also helps to disguise its structure and its intellectual affirmation. So the persona of “November Walk,” like that of “Vancouver Lights,” adopts his appropriate pose. The conclusions to which these poems come are not dissimilar: “November Walk near False Creek Mouth” is Birney's most profound exploration of the paradox, in both poems, that meaning arises from the mind's contemplation of meaninglessness.

The essential ironic device of “November Walk” is formal: the poem seems to be an unstructured meditation, as meandering as the persona's walk. In fact, it is highly patterned and structured. For instance, the poem begins with a downward movement from the cosmos “to the dense unbeating black unapproachable / heart of this world” (p. 44). A parallel movement upward from the sea-bottom begins in Section IV, at the centre of the poem. The season and time of day and the sun's downward progress all help to pattern the poem. But there is a more important structural consideration. At the beginning of, and sometimes within, each section, there are italicized, chorus-like verse-paragraphs:

The time is the last of warmth
and the fading of brightness
The beat is the small                    slap                    slapping
The theme lies in the layers
Slowly                    scarcely sensed                    the beat
has been quickening …

(II, 43, 44, 48)

These repetitions suggest the persona's awareness of the inanimate forces of the universe as the basis of order for his observations and thoughts. If we prefer to treat the persona as overheard in the composition of a poem, then the repetitions telegraph the basis of order for his adapting and transforming in that creation. “November Walk” pictures a meaningless universe which is apparently echoed by a meaningless, fragmented human society. It is a powerful picture and tends to obscure the fact that the poem also pictures the very process of the mind's ordering of chaos. So the poem's form contains its meaning.

The poem begins,

The time is the last of warmth
and the fading of brightness
          before the final flash and the night
I walk as the earth turns
from its burning father
here on this lowest edge of mortal city

These lines encapsulate the meditation to come. First, they are representative of Birney's autumnal tone throughout, a singleness of tone which does much to mask the complexity of the real conflict the poem raises. Then, the poem is largely an expansion on the ways in which “the earth turns” from the sun and from all the ancient order the sun represents. The city is the poem's chief symbol for this modern disassociation; the denizens of the beach are mostly “the lovers / of what is not city” (II, 43). Approaching sunset, appropriately, symbolizes the threat of atomic catastrophe. Nuclear war, however, is not the chief apocalyptic threat of the poem; rather it serves itself as a symbol for the way man has destroyed the natural and mythical world in his creation of modern sterility—the real apocalypse. As the sun's setting during the course of the poem implies, this catastrophe has already happened; the poem mourns it.

If this is reminiscent of the persona's post-catastrophic point of view in “Vancouver Lights,” it is also worth noting that Birney is again using the imagery of light in the same paradoxical way. It is a further indication of Birney's thematic continuity that a crucial question in “David” is raised again in “November Walk.” Bob, in the early poem, says after he has pushed David off The Finger's ledge: “I will not remember how nor why I could twist / Up the wind-devilled peak …” (I, 112 [emphasis added]). The memory he tries to repress here is of an inner struggle which must have possessed him, at whatever level of consciousness, forcing him to fight off the urge to follow his friend over the ledge. Though Bob never verbalizes the lesson learned from his experience, except cryptically in the last line, the poem's action makes clear that Bob did find an answer to the “why” of living. The same question is asked by the persona of “November Walk,” when, in section II, he reaches both the geographical and psychological low point of his walk:

and I                    having clambered down to the last
shelf of the gasping world of lungs
do not know why I too wait                    and stare
before descending the final step
into the clouds of the sea

(II, 46)

But he does not take the “final step.” Seeking to know why he continues his living, the poet must examine his reduced world. Birney transforms the apparently random sights of the beach to a series of literary and mythic references, all treated ironically to suggest their modern irrelevance. The series moves back in time: from three writers; through the biblical story of the wise men, ironically here a

… wrinkled triad of tourists
seeking a starred sign for the bus-stop
They dangle plastic totems                    a kewpie
a Hong Kong puzzle for somebody's child
who waits to be worshipped
back on the prairie farm

Next there is “a local Buddha,” a beach bum (II, 45); then some representatives of Scandinavian mythology, now living trivially in Winnipeg; and finally “At the edge of knowledge the Prince Apollo / (or is it the Princess Helen?).” Canadian nature and mythology are easily disposed of. Birney wanders

… under the leafless maples
between the lost salt home
and the asphalt ledge where carhorns call
call in the clotting air by a shore
where shamans never again will sound
with moon-snail conch the ritual plea
to brother salmon or vanished seal

(II, 47)

The future envisioned in section VII is as bleak and meaningless as the present world. As man moves out to explore “… a galaxy-full perhaps / of suns and penthouses waiting,” (II, 51), how can a single sun remain our one “burning father” (II, 43)?

But still on the highest shelf of ever
washed by the curve of timeless returnings
lies the unreached unreachable nothing
whose winds wash down to the human shores

The abstraction of these lines would make them meaningless had they been unprepared for. But, in context, they assert that, however many suns man may outreach, the same cosmic forces of time and space will operate: mechanical in their operation, but infinite nevertheless, and “nothing” for both reasons. But the nothingness which is mechanical, when it is transformed through the human mind, gives form to the nothing which is infinite. As long as this infinity remains, man's mind has scope. The old structures of order have gone or are going. But their essence was the ordering mind and it remains

in the last of warmth
and the fading of brightness
on the sliding edge of the beating sea

(II, 51)

“November Walk near False Creek Mouth” has hidden a structure and meaning in apparent formlessness and fragmentation. The conflict which the poem thus hides and reveals is that between meaning and meaninglessness, between form and chaos. The reader is privy in this poem to the elemental struggle to order, which is itself affirmed to be the meaning and purpose of life.¹⁵

“The Mammoth Corridors” (II, 61-65), though it was not collected until Rag & Bone Shop (1971), is also a poem in the tradition of “Vancouver Lights” and “November Walk,” meditating upon aspects of landscape in order to illuminate the current human condition. “The Mammoth Corridors” begins geographically and thematically in the setting of “November Walk.” It is a poem which pictures man at the “blind corridor's end” (II, 63). It seems itself to be a journey into a blind end, but it is in fact also a mental journey which has for its object the facing and encompassing of that cold end. It restates the theme of “November Walk”: in facing the meaningless, we discover the only possible meaning. The conflict revealed in the poem is the paradox that it is our compulsion towards death which is man's survival force.

Several paradoxes are inherent in the poem's first lines:

Turning from the great islands drowning
in the morning's waves from Asia
my car heads me from the city's April
          cherry petals on the slick streets

(II, 61)

Birney turns from the east to drive east. And he turns from a Vancouver spring to make his way back into winter. His journey is thus hinted to be also a stasis, or a journey only of the mind. As the fourth line suggests, and as the later descriptions of Vancouver confirm, spring has little meaning, or only an ironic significance, in the urban world. The most important thing to notice about these first lines, however, is that Birney's car is apparently driving him. Throughout the poem, the car is seen as a force compelling Birney eastward:

my wheels will themselves …
                                                  … the master I own
has rushed me to winter …
                                        … my Engine unreels me
charges in a dazzle of snow …
I am pulled to
I am drawn against …

(II, 61, 62, 64, 65)

We are to see the car as a symbol of the sterile and mechanical urban world and of “the truths that compel” Birney, which are the decadent results of that world: “… ulcers vitamins bulletins accidia.” As such, the car leads Birney and his society as the mammoths led the Siberians, “past the point / of no return.” The poem pictures our society fast becoming extinct; it is as dependent on the car, and by extension on technology, as the Siberians were on the mammoths. But the fact that the Siberians turned westward when “… the last red fountains … gushed … at the blind corridor's end” (II, 63) suggests that the same force which compels a society toward extinction may thereby compel it also to face and conquer the new situation.

The Siberians “possessed” the Rockies not merely by learning to live off the new land, but by exorcising its dangers and realities,

                              … by capturing the deer's Wit
the Power of cougar
          in nets of dance and word
          the medicine of mask
          the threat of drum

As this understanding comes to the persona, ironic symbols of man's progress toward extinction are clustered in the “tourist-brochure” counterpoint which accompanies the poem:¹⁶

In the nearby museum, mounted specimens of
                                                  the wild life,
and a spacious diorama outlining the story of
                                                            man. No charge.
Through Calgary …
… Canada's greatest car-per-capita
city … in Bowness Park, life-sized models of
                                                  dinosaurs that once roamed the area

As Birney heads into the lingering prairie winter, the element of compulsion is stressed and made more universal. He remembers

where all began for me
          … the log cabin where first i was forced
into air

(II, 64)

Birney's progress into the whiteout of the Prairies is at once a journey into the “nothing” of “November Walk,” and into the realization of the need to give meaning to this nothing:

i am pulled to a sky of land
flattened white to the Pole

The wind from the polar icecap is personified as “the breath of that madcap virgin / mother of ice.” This personification—the only significant one in the poem—is a personification of the forces of frigidity, of Birney's and his society's death. It is Birney's way of giving meaning to that force, death or nothingness, toward which he has been drawn.

Like the mammoths who seemed to lead the Siberians to death and a blind end, but in fact led them to a new life, Birney's society has led him to its winter. Driving into the real winter, Birney can face, and come to terms with, the spiritual winter which is represented by the urban sterility of Vancouver. Precisely because Birney “cannot forget” the “Greenland lodger,” and that he “… is graved / with her monstrous rutting” (II, 65), he may be able to survive. Thus the purpose of the counterpointed brochure prose is to provide an example of the kind of avoidance of reality which leads to, and is part of, society's death. But Birney too may outlive sleep by capturing the essence of man's new enemy, by encircling spiritual winter “in nets of dance and word / the medicine of mask” (II, 64). His poem is just such a spell.

The development of Birney's poetry has always been most clearly a matter of form. His techniques are rooted in the ancient traditions of English prosody, and he has used and modified numerous genres and forms in a continuing search for ways to communicate his meanings. Birney's concern with the sound of his poems has perhaps been the constant in all his experimentings. It seems to have been the basis for his earliest attention to visual form, and that attention began in the 1940s.¹⁷ Many of the poems in Ice Cod Bell or Stone employ unorthodox typography and, by 1964, with the publication of Near False Creek Mouth, Birney had largely abandoned traditional punctuation. Thus, Birney's later concrete poetry represents no sudden change. It is rather the culmination of a gradual and consistent development. That affirmation within irony may also be important to Birney's concrete poetry is suggested by the following analysis by William Gray of “up her can nada” (II, 159), a poem which forms a map of Ontario:

… through an ironic mixture of enduring will and joy Birney composes a map which unites the disparate elements of his country. The blend of colours, type sizes and visual patterns is both chaotic and creative; such linguistic art truly imitates the life it signifies, and on this most Concrete level manages to convey an identity. As in “November Walk”, Birney depicts the Canadian identity as a surface chaos containing an underlying potential for creative order and life.¹⁸

But since content and form are not properly separable things, it would be wrong to say that Birney has merely put old wine into new bottles in his latest, or any of his poetry. Though an active humanism is basic to all of his poetry, the poems of the sixties and seventies are usually less proselytizing, more relaxed both in tone and intellectual structure. Birney's views inform his poetry which, however, seems more and more to have accepted the world as it is. In Birney's recent books, more of the poems than ever before are love poems. In fact, his whole development towards freedom of form, towards informality, and towards introspection, is accurately described as a movement toward the romantic pole of literary expression. In this sense, Birney's poetic development itself reflects a willingness to go beyond irony toward affirmation.

In resigning his heroic attempt to modernize the Canadian Authors Association, Birney wrote in 1949,

For to age is common, but not as the CAA ages, for by its hostility to the work of the young it fails to renew itself with the blood of youth.¹⁹

That Birney's work seems to increase in youthfulness as he grows older is no accident. It is part of his ethos, part of what has always made his writing important. To conclude, then: a light look at one of Birney's most youthful poems. But it will be no surprise to find therein some old familiar concerns.

“Curiously, what irony often teaches,” said Birney in 1936, “is simply the necessity for a sense of humour …” (“CI,” I, i, 35). What Birney the scholar recognized, took a little longer for Birney the poet to work out. But by 1968, a Birney had developed who could write in such a puckish manner that “Song for Sunsets” (I, 58) just avoids tumbling into an abyss of cuteness. In spite of its tone, however, the poem is essentially ironic in method and revolves around those cosmic contrasts in size, of which Birney is so fond.

But there is more than a difference of tone in “Song,” as compared, say, with “Vancouver Lights.” Birney's more recent poem has a different resolution, which, while it affirms human prerogatives, also assents in the relationship of those prerogatives to an indifferent cosmos.

“Song” is composed in the form of an ode to the sun, which is personified ironically. The poem's easy colloquialism and simplicity are used to mask a subtle affirmation that it is human life which gives meaning to an unthinking cosmos. This colloquial method allows Birney to address the sun with great familiarity, the implication of which is equality, if not contempt. The poem's contrasts in size are, therefore, ironic and serve to point out human largeness.

Each verse-paragraph of the poem describes a comic and cosmic backward “somersault” from the sun, and both the visual appearance of the poem on the page, and the poem's syntax reinforce this. The whole poem should be seen as a comic inversion in which Birney pretends to be merely a speck

… on the little ball
so slowly rolling
backwards from you

But, allowing for the change of tone, it is clear that Birney has not forgotten his perch on those mountains above Vancouver's lights. The second verse-paragraph glances lightly at the “black” side of life—man's slightly ridiculous “dumb / somersault.” Apparently man needs the sun to keep the universe regular while he sleeps. The sun “never sleeps,” according to verse-paragraph three, and seems, therefore, not to be part of that process of changing and dying which characterizes life on earth, symbolized in the poem by the alternation of night and day. But although the sun “never notices,” is indifferent, the reader may notice that the sun is responsible for the alternation.

“Song” is a poem almost childlike in tone. Birney's pose as a child of the universe is continued when he says “goodnite” to “big dad.” But it is the sly, old child who adds

we'll switch on now
our own small stars

Man's “somersault” turns out not to be so “dumb” after all, and in fact he doesn't need the sun. Or does he? Man lies

          … in darkness burning
turning
through unspace untime

Man has transcended the mechanical universe and can invent his own light, out of solar space and time. But he also invents it from the sun, from the stored energy of coal and oil, and so the poem swings inevitably

… upsadaisy back
i trust to you

(I, 58)

The poet cannot be sure of the next day, cannot be sure of life, for all his inventing. For that mortal disease there is no remedy but “trust.” A trust whose precariousness we now feel, and which we realize has been part of the poem, part of its sense of fragility, of second childhood. A song for sun sets after all.

I have sought in this essay to present a view of Birney, the humanist, the affirmer of life. But I have sought to show that his humanism is anchored in human reality. Birney's affirmation arises only from an unflinching acceptance of man's destructiveness, his death-wish. Such an affirmation demands the ironic.

But I want to conclude not with these technical terms, but with some more human. In a review of Rag & Bone Shop, Judith Copithorne says

There's something very sad in much Canadian poetry. It comes from the experiencing of a non sanctified universe without the joys of an accepted animal existence. Now's the time to touch gently. Dreams we all have, are we realizing them?²⁰

Birney's craft and humanity combine in his poems precisely to realize our dreams.

Notes

1. “Chaucer's Irony,” Diss. Toronto 1936, 2 vols., I, i, 55. All further references to this work (“CI”) appear in the text.

2. I have, in fact, quoted this definition from Birney's “English Irony Before Chaucer,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 6 (1937), 540, because it is a more compact version of the same thing.

3. In “Proletarian Literature: Theory and Practice,” Birney states, “Proletarian art, as the art of class-conscious and struggling men, can be little more than a lucky incident in a career primarily devoted to the more direct and urgent tasks of political argument and political struggle” (The Canadian Forum, May 1937, p. 60). See also Birney's recent statements on this period in “Canlittering with the Forum: 1936-42,” in The Canadian Forum, April 1980, p. 10.

4. See Earle Birney, The Cow Jumped Over the Moon: The Writing and Reading of Poetry (Canada: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), p. 6. All further references to this work (CJ) appear in the text. See also Frank Davey, Earle Birney, Studies in Canadian Literature (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1971), pp. 20-21.

5. The Collected Poems of Earle Birney, 2 vols. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975), I, 27. Unless otherwise noted, all further references to Birney's poems are to this work and appear in the text. “Slug in Woods” was first published in The Canadian Forum, Feb. 1937, p. 22.

6. Milton Wilson, “Letters in Canada, 1964: Poetry,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 34 (1965), 350.

7. “Earle Birney's ‘David’: A Reconsideration,” CV/II, 2, No. 3 (Aug. 1976), 27.

8. Richard Robillard, Earle Birney, New Canadian Library, Canadian Writers, No. 9 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), p. 24.

9. Now is Time (Toronto: Ryerson, 1945), p. 16.

10. Selected Poems 1940-1966 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966), pp. x-xi.

11. “A Pair of 10-Foot-Concrete Shoes,” The Fiddlehead, No. 65 (Summer 1965), p. 75.

12. See Sylvia Frieson, “The Development of the Ironic Persona in the Work of Earle Birney,” M.A. Thesis Manitoba 1975.

13. From “Cartagena de Indias, 1962,” Collected Poems, II, 72, which is also a poem utilizing the tourist persona for an examination of alienation.

14. Bruce Nesbitt, Introduction, in Earle Birney, ed. and introd. Bruce Nesbitt Critical Views on Canadian Writers, No. 9 (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1974), p. 17.

15. Peter C. Noel-Bentley (“A Study of the Poetry of Earle Birney,” M.A. Thesis Toronto 1966) comes close to my view of “November Walk,” when he says

    … godhead has not yet been achieved by man, and never will be: and as long as it never is, there is room for growth.

    (p. 132)

    But is “godhead” the right word, when Birney finds God within man or nowhere? The comparison with Browning which Dr. Noel-Bentley makes is surely inappropriate. Is it not precisely a 19th-century sort of view of everlasting progress which Birney must have rejected in rejecting change through revolution? In his concern to face and encompass, as the definers of life, meaninglessness and death, Birney approaches rather the existential pole of thought.

16. Though Birney took some phrases from real tourist brochures, he invented most of them. “Alfred Stettler's Guide to the Canadian West (Midnapore, Alta.: Prairie Flower Press, 1964),” which was acknowledged in one of the poem's many incarnations—in The Tamarack Review, No. 41 (Autumn 1966), pp. 42-47—is equally fictitious. (Letter received from Birney, 2 Nov. 1975.)

17. Caroline Bayard and Jack David [Interview with Earle Birney], in Out-Posts / Avant-Postes, ed. Caroline Bayard and Jack David (Erin, Ont.: Porcépic, 1978), esp. pp. 109-10. See also Birney's account of his early childhood acquaintance with shapes of words in “Birney Recounts Growing Up with CanLit,” Quill & Quire, May 1980, p. 8.

18. “Earle Birney's Concrete Architecture: Beginnings and Ends,” CV/II, 2, No. 2 (May 1976), 45.

19. Here and Now, 1 (Jan. 1949), 86-87; rpt. in Louis Dudek and Michael Gnarowski, eds., The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Articles on Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Ryerson, 1979), p. 148.

20. Judith Copithorne, “Birney Burns Brightly On,” Georgia Straight, 3-10 March 1971, p. 21.