The Bear

Kinnell has noted that of all the poems he has written, “The Bear” is one of his favorites. Yet it is one of the poems he understands the least. It is a poem he wrote intuitively and that others have interpreted for him over the years. While he cannot say what he consciously intended in writing the poem, he has given readers insight into the source material.

In a conversation with Iowa Review, Kinnell says he wrote “The Bear” after hearing a story about a man who went on a bear hunt with Inuit people. The story fascinated him, and he wrote the poem out of that fascination, wanting to give it a mythological quality.

Bears feature prominently in myths all over the world, but especially in America and among Indigenous Americans of the Pacific Northwest and the Arctic. Incidentally, the word “arctic” comes from the Greek word “arktos,” which means “bear” because the Arctic circle is located directly under the constellation of the bear. The bear in Inuit culture, like many animals in their mythology, is treated as sacred, with Inuit myths teaching that it has an eternal spirit. The bear sacrifices its physical body for man to eat, but its spirit returns to the spirit world before returning again to sacrifice a new body. Inuit teach a similar myth about the salmon who they call “the swimmer.” Both bear and salmon are important food sources for those living in the far north, and these stories frame the hunting and killing of these animals as part of a spiritual practice that maintains their respect for the natural world at the same time that they destroy parts of it to survive.

This helps explain the ending stanzas of “The Bear” in which Kinnell writes that the bear feels it must get up and dance yet notes that the bear lies still. It refers to the spirit of the bear going on in its spiritual afterlife while the body of the bear is now dead. It is from ideas like this that critics call Kinnell’s poems “shamanistic.”

Shamans are part of most traditional, animistic religions. They are people who attest to a powerful supernatural connection with nature and can communicate with the Earth and animals in a way most people cannot. Usually, they use this connection to heal rifts between people and nature and bring balance to both. “The Bear” is a prominent example of a poem that walks between the human world and the natural world, with the hunter wrapping himself in the body of the bear for protection and comfort so he can sleep. In the dream, the hunter and the bear transfuse their consciousness, though the hunter cannot fully understand what that means.

One of the liberties Kinnell takes is to depict the hunter pursuing the bear in solitude. In reality Inuit usually hunt with their dogs, and the hunter who relayed his story to Kinnell would have been hunting in a group. However, pursuing the bear in solitude allows the speaker a greater level of privacy and allows the poem to become an allegory for personal, spiritual transcendence rather than the mere relaying of an adventure story.