Friday, April 23, 2010
Hay for the Horses- Gary Snyder
OK< clearly this poem is about "Hay" in which horses eat. The setting is of course on a farm The young man at the beginning was setting the tone, describing the time of day and the complications, rather dangerous and long trip to the barn. The reason I say dangerous because the passage uses the word dangerous when mentioning the dangerous mountain roads. The entire second stanza are words like (stack, clean, splintery, high in the dark, hooks, ropes, whirling through)which all give the sound that they or the person was working extremely hard with unloading hay and preparing it for the horses to eat. Hay is very dirty and wild that it gets everywhere and that's why the person said "Itch of hay dust in the sweaty shirt and shoes." Which indicates that the hay dust from the hay irritates the skin. In the last stanza of the poem the person tells his life story in just a few lines. Assuming that its a male due to the masculinity of the job requirements, he says that here he is 68 years old doing the same thing he did when he was 17 years old. The whole message is that a lot of people feel that their current jobs are temporary and as life passes by they realize that it turns into something permanent. He obviously didn't plan to be doing the same thing especially because he uses the term "dammit" here I am. That term creates an unsettled frustrated tone. And most people feel that way about their jobs because its something they just settled for or just had to work with.
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Good reading of the literal level of the peom, though, ironically, what you indicate as the "whole message" of the poem has little to do with what you metnioned at the beginning of your post--that the poem is about "hay," which is to say more than one may at first realize, here. "Hay," of course, is the business at hand, but it would help to put this poem in context of other Snyder poems, and his world view as suggested in those poems--see my comments on others' blogs discussing Snyder's poems "RiRap" and "I Went into the Maverick Bar": how does this poem also give us a glimpse, through the "cracks" of the work-a-day world, of the "real work" he refers to in "Maverick Bar" and that the image patterns of these three poems DO (the "real work" as, in one of its manifestations, creative work of mind/imagination, of imaginative ecology, and finding the "real" interconnectedness in nature); this is a William Carlos Williams "The Red Wheelbarrow" poem, in this way--count down the lines to the image at dead center of the poem--the end of the first 12 lines, and then 12 more lines following it. This central image is the keystone of the poem (as is the red, rain-and imagination-glazed wheelbarrow in W C W's poem)--read the poem without this image, and you'll see the difference; what looks on the surface like a farily straightforward social commentary, as you outline on your blog, gets a twist with this image--the only one that begins to lift us out of that routine, literally and metaphorically up through, following "alfalfa" (the name suggestive, with "a"s,first things, and Alfa...) the "shingle-cracks" in our "ordinary mind," as the Zen monks might put it, to...not any arrived at concept, or any particular single thing, but "light," which is why the image stands as it does in all its ambiguity; it's the direction, the rhythm of movement, that "Whirling,"-- swirl, spiral--again, that's important, leading to, among other places in "space and time" ("RipRap"), the Milky Way.... (see the poem "RipRap," and comments on blogs). Through the cracks, we can glimpse the light, penetrating darkness below...
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