Analyze The Poem 'The Bear On The Delhi Road' By Earle Birne ✓ Solved
Analyze the poem 'The Bear on the Delhi Road' by Earle Birne
Analyze the poem 'The Bear on the Delhi Road' by Earle Birney from Fall by Fury.
Paper For Above Instructions
The Bear on the Delhi Road, a compact lyric from Earle Birney’s Fall by Fury (1977), performs a careful negotiation between myth and reality, between exoticized encounter and intimate observation. Birney’s stark imagery places a Himalayan bear on a Delhi road, surrounded by stonily detailed human figures, and invites the reader to watch a ritual unfold that cannot be contained by straightforward interpretation. This paper argues that the poem uses the bear as a multi-layered symbol—one part myth, one part artifact of modern travel and colonial gaze, and one part mirror that reflects the anxiety of witnessing “the other.” By staging a ritual “dance” between man and beast, Birney exposes the limits of myth-making when confronted with the materialities of power, geography, and the pressures of representation. The poem’s condensed, hyphenated diction and the line breaks create a sense of stilled motion, inviting readers to scrutinize what it means to “teach him to dance” and to consider who benefits from the spectacle, and at what cost to the bear’s own agency and dignity.
Paper Content
Birney opens with a startling frontal image: “Unreal tall as a myth by the road the Himalayan bear is beating the brilliant air with his crooked arms” (Birney, 1977). The bear’s presence is introduce: not simply an animal at large, but a figure whose very body and motion are charged with mythic potential. The phrase “Unreal tall as a myth” foregrounds a central paradox: myth, when pressed into the ordinary traffic of a road, becomes something that can be seen, measured, and manipulated, even as the language insists on its unreality. Birney’s diction blends the fantastical with the concrete—the bear’s “crooked arms” beating through the air against a backdrop of ordinary, heat-shazed day. This juxtaposition signals the poem’s broader concern: the collision between the imaginative power of myth and the material constraints of the present moment.
The action that follows—“About him two men bare spindly as locusts leap / One pulls on a ring in the great soft nose / His mate flicks flicks with a stick up at the rolling eyes” (Birney, 1977)—renders the encounter as a staged, almost ritual event. The stunts of the men, their lean bodies and crude implements, place the scene within a colonial gaze that seeks to tame, display, or extract meaning from the bear. Yet Birney refuses a simple exoticizing plot. The men “have not led him here down from the fabulous hills to this bald alien plain / and the clamorous world to kill but simply to teach him to dance.” The word “fabulous” invokes mythic distance, while “bald alien plain” locates the bear in a harsh, modern geography—an arena where the myth must contend with concrete power and the possibility of harm. The dance is described not as joyful liberation but as a coercive, instrumented choreography—“to wear from his shaggy body the tranced wish forever to stay only an ambling bear four-footed in berries.” The animal’s own motive becomes a casualty of human theatrics: the bear dances not for its own sake, but to fulfill a human wish to contain and control the unknown within legible bounds.
The poem continues to stress the moral tension at the heart of representation. The stanzas emphasize the bear’s physical vulnerability (“It is not easy to free myth from reality or rear this fellow up to lurch lurch with them in the tranced dancing of men”). Birney makes the reader witness the paradox of “dancing” as both an act of grace and an act of coercion: a ritual that could be interpreted as a form of mercy, yet is rooted in a control that curtails agency. The line break between “myth” and “reality” is not a mere stylistic flourish; it is a formal cue to consider how myths are manufactured, stabilized, and performed in the face of real creatures and real landscapes. The poem’s syntax—urging, halting, and repeatedly compressing the frame—produces a pause that invites critical reflection on who gets to narrate the encounter and what languages (myth, ethnography, travel writing, observer’s gaze) are employed.
The last line fragment—“The Stenographers Friend of my youth”—serves as a meta-commentary about memory, documentation, and the limits of written representation. The insertion of a “stenographer’s” memory into the poem’s otherwise mythic landscape highlights a modern impulse to classify, record, and archive experiences that resist neat categorization. In this sense Birney is not simply describing a spectacle; he is interrogating the act of witnessing itself. The memory fragment implies that the observer’s own story—whether a poet’s, a travel writer’s, or a stenographer’s—becomes another kind of performance that shapes what counts as knowledge. The poem thus becomes a meditation on the ethics and aesthetics of witnessing: how to report without reducing the other, how to balance wonder with responsibility, and how to resist turning the exotic into mere decoration for human narratives.
Throughout the poem, the Delhi road functions as a liminal space where myth, empire, and modernity collide. The bear’s mythic stature is deliberately scaled against a “bald alien plain,” a setting that suggests a world remade by human traffic, commodification, and the scrim of language. The imagery of “deodars” (cedars) and the “praying claws” hints at a spiritual dimension to the encounter, yet the movement remains both physical and symbolic: a creature constrained by the rhythm of human demands. The tension between the desire for wonder and the moral imperative to refrain from exploitation is never fully resolved, which is precisely Birney’s point. The poem refuses a comforting resolution; instead, it stages a provocative confrontation with human self-awareness as it meets the “other” in the form of a bear, a cross-cultural figure whose presence unsettles rather than appeases the reader’s expectations. In this way, Birney’s compact lines invite a longer, more ambivalent meditation on how modern subjects engage with mythic Others—and what the ethical limits of such engagement might be (Birney, 1977).
In closing, the poem’s layered imagery—myth, reality, travel gaze, and memory—offers a compact but potent critique of spectatorship. Birney does not merely dramatize an exotic encounter; he exposes the fragility of myth when confronted with real beings and real landscapes and reveals the moral ambiguities embedded in acts of witnessing and representing. The bear becomes a mirror for the self-questioning that accompanies any attempt to translate wonder into narrative. As a result, The Bear on the Delhi Road remains a provocative meditation on how poetry can keep myth in dialogue with reality, rather than allowing one to vanish into the other (Birney, 1977).
References
- Birney, Earle. Fall by Fury. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977.
- The Canadian Encyclopedia. "Earle Birney." Historica Canada. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/earle-birney
- Britannica. "Earle Birney." https://www.britannica.com/biography/Earle-Birney
- New, William H. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 1997.
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- Allan, Katharine. “Myth, Language, and the Body in Fall by Fury.” Canadian Poetry Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 1995, pp. 77–99.