The Transformed Vision: Earle Birney’s “David”

Abstract

THE TR A N SFO R M E D VI S I ON: E ARLE B I R N E Y ' S " D A V I D " ZAILIG POLLOCK and RAYMOND E. JONES University of Alberta D a v id " is one of Earle Birney's most popular and most critically acclaimed works. However, critics of "David" have been better at dealing with isolated aspects of the poem, for example, its rhythm, narrative structure, or diction, than at demonstrating its underlying unity. In other words, no one has shown that "David" is a successful work of art. We believe that, on the whole, "David" does succeed as a work of art, precisely because of its unity. Through its unity of point of view, dramatic structure, and, especially, imagery, "David" expresses a central theme in a clear and powerful manner. "David" is a poem of initiation. That is, the central episode, Bob's decision to kill David, marks the end of one stage of Bob's life and the beginning of another. The importance of this episode is that, although Bob is fulfilling David's wishes, the decision is his own. Up to this point all decisions have been made by David; Bob's role is a passive one, to admire and to accept. In effect, David's relation­ ship to Bob is that of a teacher to a pupil. This relationship cannot last, however, for the great lesson which David has to teach Bob is the lesson of responsibility, and once Bob learns this lesson it is no longer possible for him to depend on someone else to take on responsibility for him. In other words, David's teaching succeeds only when Bob takes on responsibility for himself, and thus frees himself from dependence on his teacher. In the central episode, then, Bob demonstrates, in the most striking way possible, that he has indeed learned the lesson of responsibility. He kills his teacher.1 Bob's initiation into responsibility involves an initiation into guilt as well. The relationship between guilt and responsibility is one of the central facts of human experience. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, this relationship is ex­ pressed through the story of the Fall; in the classical tradition through the stories of Prometheus and Oedipus (at least in Freud's version). By making Bob's first responsible act a source of guilt, Birney makes the same point as is made in all these stories: moral responsibility, which distinguishes a mature man from an immature child, inevitably brings with it a burden of guilt. Bob's painful initiation, which transforms his immaturity into maturity, his innocence into experience, inevitably transforms his vision of the world around him. This transformation affects every aspect of the world of "David," since English Studies in Canada,iii, 2, Summer 1977 224 this world is seen entirely through Bob's eyes. In the passage following the climactic episode, the transformation in Bob's vision is obvious: everything he sees is a direct reflection of his new sense of responsibility and guilt. In the passages leading up to this episode there is a more complex vision at work, a double vision. On the one hand, we see things through the eyes of an innocent who does not foresee the experience which will put an end to his youth and its illusions. On the other hand, we are aware of an underlying irony, for the narrator who is recreating his innocent self is, of course, no longer innocent. Having been initiated, he no longer sees the events he is describing as he did when he was living through them. This double vision is expressed through a series of ironic foreshadowings of David's death, ironic because the innocent Bob, whose story is unfolding, is unaware of their significance, but the experi­ enced Bob, who is narrating the story, is aware, as is the reader who has read the poem before and knows its ending. One of the most effective ways in which Birney presents the transformation of Bob's vision as a result of his initiation is through imagery of sun and water (water in all its forms: lakes, waterfalls, glaciers, snow, mist, clouds, and...