Commentary by Ian Lancashire

Earle Birney's "David," as much as any other Canadian poem,mythologizes the country north of the forty-nineth parallel as a land that loves the wilderness despite its toll on youth and human courage. This magnificent story pits the life-spirit of a young surveyor and mountain climber against a giant Goliath, the Finger peak in the Sawback Range of the Rocky Mountains, which will break his back and end the youth of his friend in lasting grief.

Birney based the story of David on the accidental death of his friend David Cunningham Warden, a Classics student at the University of British Columbia, in mid-September, 1927. While climbing the coastal mountains north of Vancouver with Wilbur Sparks, Warden fell fifty feet and broke his back against a "sharp rock-rib" (Elspeth Cameron, Earle Birney: A Life [Toronto: Viking, 1994]: 190). Sparks brought a rescue party a day later, but exposure and loss of blood as Warden lay paralyzed (though conscious) weakened him. Hedied in Vancouver General Hospital on September 19.

The setting of David's fall differs from Warden's. Birney imaginedthe events of his poem as taking place, not on the coastal ranges, but on "the peaks on the north of the Bow Valley above Banff, particularly MountLouis" (Cameron 189). The poem does not mention this peak, but it is in the Sawback Range, near the Forty Mile Creek Valley, and is visible from the Trans-Canada highway. Its limestone tower rises 2,680 meters (8,793 feet).There are some ten mountains in the Sawback Range, one of themthe Finger. Those that climb Mount Louis by the Gmoser route sometimes use a deep chimney that splits the tower of the peak, like the oneDavid and Bobbie climb on the final stage of the ascent. Birney himselfwas a mountain climber who grew up at Banff and who, when 17-18 years old in 1921-22, worked on a four-man surveying team. He knew the Sawback Range near Banff better than the coastal range (Cameron 34-36).

"David" tells the story of six mountains, a fictitious peak (Mount Gleam) andfive known ones: an unnamed peak in the Ramparts Range, Mount Inglismaldie, Sundance Peak, the Fortress, and the Finger in the Sawback Range. During these climbs, Bobbie learns techniques of climbing from David, some foreshadowing the final accident. On Mount Gleam he uses the instability or "give of shale for giant incredible / Strides." From the Rampart Range David sees the sunlit Finger to the south, "an overhang / Crooked like a talon"; and they find the skeleton of a goat eaten by hawks. Mount Inglismaldie also has associations with death: the tracks of a grizzy bear, and the fossils of extinct Cambrian trilobites. On Sundance David, at a difficult point in the climb, "Slipped from his holds and hung by the quivering pick"; and later, on the descent, he killed a robin that had a broken wing. His question to Bobbie, who wanted to save the bird, "Could you teach it to fly?", anticipates David's plea to him on the Finger. They took two attempts to scale the Fortress, and on their descent were "scouted" (hunted) by a marten.

Birney narrates the fall of David as if it was destined, being foreshadowed by ominous signs. The Finger also took two trials. Only when David found the chimney could they reach the top. There they unroped and made "A cairn on the rotting tip": in Biblical texts, a cairn can be a funeral monument for a hero. The word "tip" means, not just summit, but garbage dumped into a hole; and the term "rotting" anticipates the rockface that, "crumbled", was to pitch David to his death. The "give" of shale on Mount Gleam becomes the "slither of stones" that betrays David. Like the fallen goat, he also seems to have been seizedby a hungry bird of prey. The rock that breaks his back is "a cruel fang." When he begs, for a third time, to be pushed over the edge of the cliff, a hawk flies overhead. The Finger itself is the very personification of Alfred Lord Tennyson's nature in "In Memoriam" (a lengthy series of poems on the death of a friend), "red in tooth and claw." The Finger was "crooked like a talon" and "hooked."

The fall of a tragic hero in the English tradition normally happens, not by a little accident -- like slipping on crumbly rockface -- but as a result of a flaw in character or a moral mistake. Does either David orBobbie have such a tragic flaw? Although David claims that he did not test"his foothold" and so is responsible for his own fall, Bobbie knows this to be false. "It was I who had not." On the top of the Finger, Bobbie turned to look at Mount Assiniboine, "heedless / Of handhold. And one foot gave." He uses the same word that earlier described the way slate slides under one's feet. The accident was not David's, but Bobbie's. Yet carelessness does not amount to a tragic fault. Although Bobbie inadvertently caused the fifty-foot fall, David is right when he says, "Don't ever blame yourself."

Whose flaw, then, is it? Birney has the Finger "Beckoning [signaling] bleakly the wide indifferent sky." It is something much bigger than David or Bobbie that should be paying attention, and yet it is "indifferent." Does Birney mean that the mountain that kills Davidis "giving the finger" (showing contempt for) to the heavens? This American idiom dates from 1893.

When faced with David's plight, Bobbie's male instinct is to disbelieve it. But he knows that he lies when he says that David's bleeding will "stop" and that he will "last" long enough to be rescued. Once he accepts that David will die, Bobbie is forced to take complete responsibility for his friend's death by pushing him over a 600-foot drop. He must consciously, with full awareness of what he is doing, murder his friend if he is to make amends to David for what Bobbie's carelessness caused. When David asks Bobbie to kill him, and when Bobbie knows what he must do, his plight becomes tragic. Such self-knowledge ennobles David's otherwise accidental, meaningless fall. The only way Bobbie can grant his friend's wish, to ameliorate the pain that David suffers, is by finishing him off. Bobbie becomes a killer in spite of himself. So horrific is the act which transforms David into "It" that Bobbie cannot even explain what happened.

The landscape through which Bobbie travels sufficiently describes his own fate.The peak of the Finger is "wind-devilled", the bergschrund is a "grave-cold maw",and the snowbridge is "cankered" (that is, diseased). The seracs are "fanged / And blinding." The glacier has a "snout" as if it were a rooting beast. The poem's last line culminates in attributing the death of Bobbie's youth to the manner of David's death.

In one respect only does "David" allude to a flaw -- pride and overreaching -- that is responsible for the deaths of many classical tragic heroes. Bobbie says at the start of the poem that "mountains for David were made to see over." That last word, "over," recurs later when David begs, "Over ... over", "Bob, I want to go over!", and "For Christ's sake push me over!" Such a little word, and so ironically reused. A suicide wish, to be pushed over the cliff, rewards David's wish to see over the mountains.

"David" has a good claim to be high tragedy. Back to Line