Mystic Wreckage
By Nik Hoffman: Awe and Wonder in Sam Downey-Higgins' "Bear Lake Encyclical"
I am writing about Sam Downey-Higgins’ poem “Bear Lake Encyclical” not because it needs appreciation, but because it is already appreciated. Indeed, this piece was occasioned by the fact that Bear Lake is one of the best-received poems that Silver Door has published. Little persuasion on my part will be necessary to convince the reader of its merits. Therefore the task at hand is to ascertain, examine and explore the qualities that attract us to this poem.
My claim is that this poem appeals to us because Mr. Downey-Higgins has captured a mystic encounter with nature. Secondly, this encounter is eminently accessible. It is cemented in reality. Despite the mystic sense, the poem’s place is not fantastical. It is precisely the penetration of the spiritual through the material which attracts us to this poem. It imbues nature with wonder.
The title tells us that this poem is intended as a circulatory letter. It is a report from the experience at Bear Lake meant to be distributed among a certain group. Interestingly, there is no “I” or “my” in the poem. The speaker uses “our.” My sense is that this is a singular speaker speaking with a communal voice. Bear Lake may perhaps make the speaker feel a tighter bond with his fellow man. As it is, he is making a very public statement, a statement with a meaning that is meant to be shared.
We see that there is no privatism here. We are meant to access all of the images. We all share in the experience of Bear Lake. Despite the Canadian locality and the uncertain geographical placement1, we each participate in the spiritual encounter.
You can read the poem here:
Nature
We begin at “this cross of unhoused roads”. The crossroads, the place where a dilemma occurs, where a choice is made. It’s where one sells one’s soul to the devil. The decision made? “An unbuilt county”. Bear Lake is on the edge of civilization where the dead of “Mennonite and bear” are buried.
It’s on “its beach” where we find the most important image of the poem: “Its wreckage…this iron body”. This dilapidated boat with its decomposing hull is our entrance into Bear Lake. The sand-bound boat, an image of human catastrophe or ruination, captures the frailty and impermanence of our work, especially in comparison to the numinous lake itself. This image bookends the poem appearing in both the first and last stanzas.
We find the boat “wrestling sunlight” on the beach. The summer sun of August is straining its “red and white” knuckles grappling with the rusting hull. It is in moments like these that the poem achieves its greatest successes. We will find it again in “nave of granite”, “naked like our faces” and “brave like settler bodies”. The personification of nature is one of the poem’s primary and most successful devices.
This device is present throughout the poem, even the wreckage is “scabbed…by rust”. The woods are a “blanket-covered corpse”. “Northern highway’s shoulder/bare lake” gives us a double pun on both shoulder and bare lake; And it flashes a shimmer of erotic intrigue. The banks of the surrounding earth are “blackened footprints”. Everywhere and in everything, we see an image of man.
When we see the scabbed iron body wrestling the muscled August sunlight, we see a struggle of man against man. The river “bruised” the “brittle earth”. After nightfall, we ourselves are brought under the “howling breach of endless country” which is “meant to scramble our identity.” Everywhere in this poem, our relation to nature is a tense struggle against massive force. The poem puts us in awe of the ominous and enticing majesty of Bear Lake.
Highway
The following claim may strike the reader as strange. One of the most important words of the poem is “highway.” Without it, the effect of the poem is greatly diminished. Highway tells us that this mystic encounter with Bear Lake is accessible. “Northern highway” cements this poem in reality and modernity. The spiritual experience is not unreal or unapproachable, We can just go there.
The grounding-in-reality of this poem is furthered by the Mennonite graves, and is given geographical specificity with the “brick and tungsten” towns “Barry, Owen Sound and Sarnia”. The personified encounter with nature—the feeling that there is someone in things—is part of our real lives, albeit located on the outskirts of human things.
It is by means of the highway that we reach Bear Lake, driving our machines to approach the wilderness. However we do not enter Bear Lake by the road, at least in the poem. We both enter and exit our experience with Bear Lake with the wreckage on the beach.
As I said, this wreckage is an image of human catastrophe, but also it is an image of mutability. It shows not only the tragedy of accident by which it was made wreckage, but also its susceptibility to decay as it sits rusting on the sand. We can see a juxtaposition between the car from the highway and the rusty hull on the beach. An image of function against one of dilapidation.
Our meditation on Bear Lake begins and ends with the wreckage. Particularly with it “wrestling sunlight on the beach”. The boat is fighting the light and losing the battle to rust and discoloration. In the light, the boat is seen and known, however it is interesting that the night scrambles identity. Does this suggest that the antagonism of mutability and nature enforces identity? Perhaps.
The lake itself achieves an amount of sacredness, nothing touches it and nothing enters it. The wreckage suggests nothing can enter it. Even nature’s incense—the mist—“will barely touch” it. Bear Lake—the keeper of sleep, dreams, graves, and iron wreckage—will maintain its place, set apart from civilization, beyond the “palisades” of the town, a world unto itself.
Tone
Among the more difficult aspects to describe is tone. However a fine place to start is “here’s its wreckage rusting on the beach”. We are introduced to the wreckage with a simple “here it is.” We approach Bear Lake strangely subdued, neither enraptured nor in fear. Despite the ominous force and the poem’s bracing diction, the tone is placid and meditative. Certainly not unaffected, mind you, but merely that we meet the awesome force of the encounter with little force of our own.
We do not feel mournful over the wreckage, nor do we feel hostile towards nature. Even at its most menacing, the contrary notions between spark of “scintillation” and the dark isolation of “black certainty” which will “scramble our identity”, we remain unalarmed. We remain in awe at Bear Lake. We feel akin to it, with its “wave of leafen flesh”. The lake, like us, is “naked” and “brave”.
We are moved by something beyond our mortality in this poem. Despite the power and enormity of nature, we can see from the outside of our own death. Notice the contraries of life and death in the poem. Bear Lake contains the lively August sunlight, the “insect chaff”, and the dreams “of bear and trapper both”; But it also houses the death and decay of “dead pine”, “rotting roots” and “peaty graves”. The bear and the trapper both live and die at Bear Lake.
The poem’s disposition is free of irony, instead it moves along with reverence and clarity. The poem maintains confidence in its description, even when the meaning becomes diffused. Such as what exactly “baffling brightly muscled August’s reach” is doing to the wreckage; Or the unclear action behind the scrambled identity.
This tone of respect and awe shapes the rich atmosphere which draws us into this poem. “Bear Lake” flies highest on the organic unity of its poetic diction, personification and grounded, serious tone.
Prosody
We must not pass over the sterling music of this poem. The verse achieves wide variety on a loose iambic meter with frequent use of acephalous lines2 and redundancy3; And often finds satisfying metrical resolutions as can be observed in the effect of “into the lake’s nocturnal straits”.
Each stanza has the effect of a single, long line. This extension of sense pulls us along further and further, working up into a trance-like effect. It gives the poem a certain rolling quality of religious prayer.
Wonderful word-sounds can be found in nearly every line. “Scintillation in black certainty”, “insect chaff in evening chirrup”, “settler bodies under beech trees/seething out the river”, and “baffling brightly muscled August’s reach/into the lake’s nocturnal straits” will suffice to demonstrate.
Conclusion
One cannot help but feel that the features of Bear Lake mean something, and we come away feeling that it is no mere inanimate “environment”. Bear Lake acts upon us just as much as we act upon it. We are captured by its beauty and awe. We—the mysterious “unhoused bodies”—are drawn into a vision of beauty, struggle, change and death as we walk “northward past this iron wreckage/wrestling sunlight on the beach.”
Mr. Downey-Higgins tells us “This poem was inspired by a wilderness camping trip I took, out into the woods close to Bear Lake4” Prior to this trip he “hadn’t been writing poems for years” but after encounter the lake’s “strange omens” he began “writing poems again in earnest.” And it is no surprising outcome. With a poet’s eye, he has peered through his concrete locality, revealed the meaningful spiritual essence beyond and united them both, which is the vivifying life-blood of poesy.
I shall leave it there. “Bear Lake Encyclical” captures that inspirational spark which flows from the mysterious, awesome core of Being by way of Nature’s overwhelming magnitude. Mr. Downey-Higgins has caught the transcendent, poetic moment and has passed it on to us so that we might catch a glimpse ourselves.
Apparently there are twenty-nine different lakes in Ontario which are called “Bear Lake.”
An iambic line which drops the initial unaccented syllable.
Additional unaccented syllable at the end of the line.
