In “The Bear”, Galway Kinnell employs the setting of wilderness as well as elaborate metaphors and other figurative language to explore the internal relationship, and sometimes struggle, one has between their instinctive and rational inner selves. Kinnell’s use of figurative language to represent natural phenomena in the poem blurs the line between primitive and rational to produce an introspective exploration of the human experience. Kinnel also highlights how man is both one with nature while also being apart from it.
The poem takes a narrative form, which complements the theme of exploration Kinnell presents. The poem tells the story of a man attempting to reimmerse himself in nature and reconnect with his primal self. The setting follows the speaker in pursuit of a bear in the wild during the winter. He is acting as a hunter and his obsession with the bear develops the elaborate overarching metaphor …show more content…
The first metaphor that begins to relate landscape to body is when the speaker describes the bear hole in the ground as being “lung-colored” (6). By comparing the landscape to the body, the speaker makes the two more like one another and gives them features of one another. Kinnels employs another example figurative language when the speaker “hack[s] a ravine” in the bear’s thigh and proceeds to “eat and drink from it”, here again there is an emphasis on the man’s need for the bear to survive, much like a ravine provides the essence of life, water. By there being a ravine in the thigh of the bear it projects out into a more elaborate message that the bear is like a landscape.The literal landscape ravine is present in line 80, “In her ravine under the old snow”. The speaker then attempts to quite literally internalize the bear by climbing into the bear’s carcass and falling asleep, which again makes the bear into something of a home, such as a landscape would typically
The poem takes a narrative form, which complements the theme of exploration Kinnell presents. The poem tells the story of a man attempting to reimmerse himself in nature and reconnect with his primal self. The setting follows the speaker in pursuit of a bear in the wild during the winter. He is acting as a hunter and his obsession with the bear develops the elaborate overarching metaphor …show more content…
The first metaphor that begins to relate landscape to body is when the speaker describes the bear hole in the ground as being “lung-colored” (6). By comparing the landscape to the body, the speaker makes the two more like one another and gives them features of one another. Kinnels employs another example figurative language when the speaker “hack[s] a ravine” in the bear’s thigh and proceeds to “eat and drink from it”, here again there is an emphasis on the man’s need for the bear to survive, much like a ravine provides the essence of life, water. By there being a ravine in the thigh of the bear it projects out into a more elaborate message that the bear is like a landscape.The literal landscape ravine is present in line 80, “In her ravine under the old snow”. The speaker then attempts to quite literally internalize the bear by climbing into the bear’s carcass and falling asleep, which again makes the bear into something of a home, such as a landscape would typically