SOURCE: Kearns, Lionel. “Birney's Bear.” Canadian Literature, no. 97 (summer 1983): 172-75.

In the following essay, Kearns offers an analysis of Birney's poem, “Bear on the Delhi Road.”

Earle Birney's “Bear on the Delhi Road”¹ has long been a favourite poem of mine. It has also been a source of some anxiety and frustration, because I have never been able to understand it completely. I know it as a series of words; I know it as a structure of images and statement; I carry it in my head and use it to relate to that world out there that surrounds this consciousness in here that I call me. The poem says something to me that is very profound and very important, but I have always failed to pin it down and explain exactly what that something is. At least that has been the situation until now. Recently I have come...