Bushed by Earle Birney Performs

¶ … Bushed" by Earle Birney performs double-duty as it sits atop the poem. It describes the physical state of a man who has become lost in the wilderness or the "bush." The word bushed also, however, acts as an adjective of emotion, describing the state of the protagonist as not only lost in the wilderness, but tired and downtrodden. As the poem advances, the term takes on a new definition, suggesting that the protagonist, out of fear and isolation, becomes as wild as the environment in which he mingles. The entire poem takes after the title's example in its language and structure to suggest the development of the man lost in the wild. The language and mechanics the poem uses to tell the story indicate to the reader that the protagonist, through his time and struggles in the wild, falls into a mindset of insanity.

During the first half of the poem, the language suggests that the protagonist as courageous and hopeful. The first line states that "He invented a rainbow," the only real symbol of hope in the poem, "but lightning struck it," and he falls upon his first disappointment (Bushed, 1). The language even describes how this event affected him emotionally, saying that his "mind slowed" (3). This commentary foreshadows his mental degradation by the poem's end. but, despite this symbolic destruction of hope, the man moves forward with vigor, shooting porcupines, eating their bellies, and keeping the quills as trophies of his accomplishment (4-6). It seems that the protagonist is at his strongest and most hopeful in the third stanza when we see him shouting down the mountain in the heat of the day, "sending messages" we can only assume are signals for help and rescue (11). The word choice describing him as having "whizzed" the messages down the mountain (11) and that he "boomed proclamations" (12) indicates his strength, health and vigor at this point in his stay in the wilderness. Unfortunately, after this stanza the protagonist begins to have doubts and fears.

The protagonist's mindset begins to change in the second half of the poem when the language and mechanics become dark and less certain. The whole poem up to this point has been in free verse, without punctuation and with sporadic capitalization, serving to set up what occurs later. The thought "he tried his eyes on the lake ospreys / would fall like valkyries" is broken up between lines 15 and 16 making the thought confusing. Especially with the lack of punctuation, the reader is at first unsure of how to read it, whether to use the phrase before "lake" as an introductory phrase or use "lake" to modify "ospreys." The image of the ospreys turned valkyries also enhances the darkness and confusion with the inclusion of negative language like "cut throat" (17), "smoke" and "boil" to represent the sunset (19). In the next stanza it seems that the man perceives nature to turn on him, when, where once he embraced the moon, it now "carved unknown totems/out of the lakeshore" (20, 21), which are threatening images. Then the owls deride him (22), trees crowd in on him (23), and finally, the very winds turn the whole mountain into a weapon aimed against him when they blew, "shaping its peak to an arrowhead / poised" (25-27). The last, terrified thought in the poem shows the man's paranoia of nature and of death when "he could only / bar himself in and wait/for the great flint to come singing into his heart" (29, 30). It is in this moment the man's fear consumes him, causing him to envision nature itself coming to destroy him.