Vancouver Lights By Earle Birney

In Earle Birney’s descriptive lyric poem “Vancouver Lights” written during the Second World War, a reader is introduced to the poem through a visual panorama of sky, ocean, and city from on top of a mountain. The speaker is expressing his feelings of both celebration for human accomplishment and pessimism for probable doom while over-looking wartime Vancouver on a moonless night. Earle Birney alludes to Greek mythology throughout the poem, but the most prominent and chief allusion is to Prometheus, which is skillfully placed in the last stanza of the poem as it sparks the light to the underlying meaning. Earle Birney’s allusion to the Prometheus myth presents the poem in a way that reinforces the ultimate juxtaposition of lightness and darkness

As one version of the myth goes, Prometheus and his brother Epimetheus were punished for not fighting alongside the Titans and were sent down to earth and given the task of creating man and protecting him. Prometheus gifted man fire and allowed him to stand upright like the gods. In a food sacrificing ritual to the gods, Zeus was tricked by Prometheus, which angered him very much. As punishment, he took fire from man and returned it to the heavens. Prometheus, who loved man dearly, defiantly climbed back up to the heavens and stole fire to return it to man. His punishment was to be eternally bound to a mountain while an eagle fed on his liver daily. Another punishment was the creation of a woman named Pandora who was to be married to Prometheus’s brother. As a wedding gift, she was given a box and told not to open it, which of course, curiously, she did, releasing all the evils in the world today. As she closed the box, only hope remained, locked

When Birney writes “No one bound Prometheus Himself he chained / and consumed his own bright liver”, he is telling us that Prometheus, like humans, is the master of his own fate. He is responsible for his own suffering, even if it came at the cost of stealing fire and bringing light to man again. After Birney’s retelling of Prometheus, Pluto, the god of the underworld, who, by extension, represents darkness and gloom, signifies human’s darker impulses. Yet, after this dark reference, with the open-endedness of the last line: “there was light” (40), Birney concludes his poem with