In Praise of the Great Bull Walrus Alden Nowlan

Alden Nowlan · Leaving Cert Poetry

A poet imagines a friendly chat with a walrus, and turns the joke, without ever quite dropping it, into a genuine defence of the plain fact of being alive.

In Praise of the Great Bull Walrus: Context

Alden Nowlan (1933 to 1983) was a Canadian poet known for a plain-spoken, conversational voice and for finding large ideas inside small, ordinary moments. This poem is a good example of that habit. It refuses to keep humour and seriousness in separate boxes, and an Ordinary Level answer should do the same: do not treat the comedy as decoration sitting on top of the meaning underneath. The comedy is how the poem gets to its meaning. The whole poem is printed as a single unbroken block of twenty-nine lines rather than in stanzas, which suits its chatty, thinking-aloud voice, closer to someone talking through an idea out loud than to a formally shaped poem. There is no plot beyond a daydream: the speaker imagines spending one afternoon lying on the rocks among walruses, comparing the scene to an all-male, working-class tavern, and pictures the small talk they might exchange if a walrus could actually answer back. Nothing about the poem asks you to take the daydream literally. It is a thought experiment the speaker is clearly enjoying, and that enjoyment is part of what the poem is arguing for.

Key Moments

The poem opens by undercutting itself before it has properly started. The title promises praise, but the first words are a flat refusal.

“I wouldn’t like to be one”In Praise of the Great Bull Walrus

The middle section imagines a conversation, walrus and man swapping the same lazy greeting, as if species were no barrier at all once you strip away the fear.

“‘How yuh doin’ you big old walrus?'”In Praise of the Great Bull Walrus

Then, without any warning, the register changes completely. The joke drops away and the poem says, quite plainly, what it has been building towards.

“How good it is to share”In Praise of the Great Bull Walrus

Key Themes

The main theme is gratitude for simply existing. Nowlan uses the walrus daydream to arrive at a serious point: being alive at all, among other creatures, is itself the thing worth celebrating, and everything else is detail. A second theme is human-animal kinship. By giving the walrus identical, casual speech to the speaker’s own, the poem argues for closeness between species rather than distance. A third is mortality, handled sideways: the poem’s real subject in its closing lines is not death but non-existence, the one thing you can imagine and never have to fear because you would not be there to feel it. A fourth, quieter theme is belonging and exclusion, present in the odd detail that the imagined tavern is closed to women. Nowlan does not dwell on it or explain it away, he simply lets the detail sit there, which is worth noticing if an answer wants to discuss the poem’s blind spots as well as its strengths.

Literary Devices

The clearest device is personification: giving the walrus a voice in the same casual register as the speaker collapses the distance between them and makes the whole daydream feel like real company rather than description. The phonetic, spoken-out spelling of the dialogue turns imagined talk into something you can hear. Structurally, the poem relies on a single sharp tonal shift, comic dialogue swinging into sincere statement with no warning, which is exactly the kind of turn examiners reward students for spotting and naming.

“that we can imagine / but need never fear.”In Praise of the Great Bull Walrus

Mood

The mood is warm and self-deprecating for most of the poem, the speaker gently mocking his own daydream even as he enjoys it. There is no anger or unease anywhere in this poem, which is unusual and worth naming in an answer, especially next to poems that use humour to hide discomfort rather than to express contentment. By the final lines the mood has settled into calm, genuine consolation, gratitude stated plainly and without any of the earlier joking to soften it. That plainness is what makes the ending land: after nearly thirty lines of comic build-up, the poem simply says what it means.

Conclusion

This is a poem that uses a joke about a walrus to say something Nowlan clearly means. It does not ask you to choose between finding it funny and finding it moving, both readings are correct at once, and a good answer should say so rather than picking one. For Ordinary Level, hold onto the shape: comic daydream first, sincere turn second, and a closing thought about non-existence that reframes everything before it. Quote the opening refusal, the dialogue, and the final paradox, and you have a complete, well-supported answer.

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