“The Bear,” from Galway Kinnell’s third book, Body Rags (1967), is one of his most anthologized and quoted poems and is often referred to as a “shamanic poem.” Kinnell has been called an American Romantic because he focuses on the restorative and spiritual powers of nature; however he has never called himself a Romantic and claims that nature is as much a core subject for poetry as writing about urbanity. In “The Bear” Kinnell writes from the persona of a hunter who follows the titular bear over ice until he finds it dying or already dead. He then climbs into its hide, where he dreams about being a bear in the spring. The poem explores themes of man’s connection with nature, primitive mindsets, the body vs. the intellect, dream-logic and death and rebirth. It is indicative of many of Kinnell’s other poems that focus on connecting with nature, exploring the human condition through animal behavior, and journeys or narratives. Some of Kinnell’s pieces comment on large public matters, including the Vietnam War. Kinnell traveled extensively as a young man, worked to end segregation in the 1960s, and settled in Vermont. He was a Pulitzer Prize winner for Collected Poems in 1983 and the Vermont Poet Laureate from 1989 to 1993. He died at the age of 87 in 2014.

Poet Biography

Galway Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island on February 1, 1927, but his family settled in Pawtucket soon after. He describes himself as an introverted child who enjoyed the work of solitary poets, such as Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe. At Princeton University he came into contact with living poets and decided to follow the writer’s path along with his classmate, the poet W.S. Merwin.

He graduated summa cum laude in 1948. Shortly after he earned a Masters of Arts at The University of Rochester he received a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Paris, which he fulfilled as just part of the several years traveling abroad in Europe and the Middle East.

Back in the United States, he was dismayed by what he saw regarding segregation and fought for equality as a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

Kinnell’s first poetry book in 1960, What a Kingdom it Was, was published by Houghton Mifflin, which issued most of his work throughout his career. With his second book, Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964), his poetry became freer, abandoning some of the formality of the 1950s to embrace the freedom of the 1960s. His third book, Body Rags (1968), included some of his most famous and most anthologized poems up to that point, including “The Bear.”

Kinnell put out 10 collections over his 35-year writing career and three additional volumes of selected works. He also published a novel, Black Light (1966); a selection of interviews, Walking Down the Stairs; and translations of works by Yves Bonnefoy, Yvan Goll, Francois Villon, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Kinnell was a MacArthur Fellow, won the 1984 National Book award with co-winner James Wright, and the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.

Kinnell taught writing at New York University up to his retirement. He lived in Vermont until he died of Leukemia in 2014 at the age of 87.

Poem Text

Kinnell, Galway. “The Bear.” 1967. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

“The Bear” is written as a monologue from the persona of a hunter tracking a bear through the winter tundra. At the start the hunter places the sharpened bone of a wolf encased in blubber on the “fairway of the bears” (Line 13). This is to entice a bear to eat it, so the bear will be stabbed by the sharpened bone from inside his stomach, and the hunter will be able to track the bear until it dies.

After the hunter notices the blubber is gone, he looks for the bear’s blood in the snow and follows the trail. He must act like a bear, get close to what the bear has touched, smell the bear, and get down on his belly to go over the “bauchy ice” (Line 26).

On the third day of tracking, the hunter “begin[s] to starve” (Line 29). He finds the bear’s “turd sopped in blood” (Line 31), “thrust[s]” it into his mouth (Line 33), and “go[es] on running” (Line 35). This is the only way for him to survive as he continues to track the bear.

Finally, he spots the bear in the distance. It is already dead. He slices open its thigh, drinks more of its blood, eats its meat raw, and climbs inside its body for warmth while he sleeps. He dreams that he is a bear who has eaten the sharpened wolf-bone and is lumbering and stumbling but cannot find a way to survive, so ultimately falls on his “rotted stomach” (Line 72), which has

tried so hard to keep up,

to digest the blood as it leaked in,

to break up

and digest the bone itself (Lines 66-69)

Then he dreams of spring and of the female mother bear licking fur into shapes.

In the final stanza the speaker wakes from his dream of being a bear, but it is not totally clear if he really is awake or not. He says that for the rest of his life he will “spend / wandering: wondering” (Lines 90-91) what was that “sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which [he] lived” (Line 93). In this last sentence the hunter is comparing the bear blood to poetry and saying it is this “poetry” (Line 93) that helped him survive, though he doesn’t quite understand how.