EWC Notes on “January Morning/Downtown Vancouver” by Earle Birney
A rainy, snowy January morning in downtown Vancouver is being described. There is a tension between the man-made city (man) and nature. Rain is being used as a unifying force to heighten the comparisons and contrasts between the city and the park. As a piece of poetry, the game is all about sounds and rhythms. Alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, cacophony, and polysyndeton create the rhythm and flow throughout. The poem is arranged like a series of snap-shots, quick images of activity and noise in the city which contrasts with the serenity of park.
The stanzas can be categorized into descriptions of man vs, nature. The poem opens with an evocative image about the dawn being the grey of a gull. This sets up the poetic, euphonious flow of images associated throughout the poem with nature. The language in the eighth stanza is less abrupt and list-like with the use of polysyndeton to create a feeling of slowness. This shows that the speed of nature is quiet and slow. During the morning of business in the city with its myriad noises and activity, only one thing is happening in the park: rain dripping off the trees and slowing the movement of spring. This slow rhythm contrasts with the choppy lists of the city stanzas.
The speed of city life is created with sound and imagery in the poem. The city is a place of noise and bustle, all of it associated with man-made things or activities. There are foghorns, roaring honking cars, the sounds of heels on pavement, the chewing of gum, and freighters evoked with various sound devices like onomatopoeia, alliteration, assonance, and consonance. The movement is created through devices like imagery, synecdoche, and lack of punctuation. Synecdoche is used to provide tightly focused images like that of fingers on steering wheels and horns; people, seen only as heads, moving into buildings. This tight focus is like a series of fast-moving images, suggesting the speed of city life. In contrast, the park is quiet, with only the drip of the rain to break the silence.
The poem also has an extended analogy, a conceit, comparing the buildings to human faces. This suits the poem’s nature vs. man conflict in that the buildings are made by men and so are personified. The older buildings have character while the newer buildings are “expressionless”, meaning that they are devoid of character. Yet even these man-made things must exist within the weather of the day. The windows are described as “meadows of glass” and the rain “snakes down” the panes.
Given how the rain is everywhere, in the city and the park, the poem is saying that man can try to escape it, but cannot actually do so. Nature will influence man’s activities. This can be seen in the “carnival of umbrellas” and the “bosoms … flattened by raincoats”.
Ultimately the poem is making a statement about how disconnected man is from nature and how very fast and activity-filled our days are. The city and its occupants gyrate constantly with little connection to nature, as symbolized by the rain. Nature, as seen in the park, is slow and constant; however, aspects of nature – specifically the weather – do unify the worlds of man and park.
Other things that could be explored:
- the cycle effect of the first and last stanzas
- the dynamic verbs
- the bracketing around stanza 8
- the imagery of stanza 7
- superficiality of life in stanza 10