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.

Unfinished Poem- Kaufman

Kaufam's poem, "Unfinished Poem," is an interesting short poem. Beginning with the title of the poem, I'm assuming that the title means that the subject of the poem can never be finished with his/her thoughts because of the simple fact that there's a host of unending perspectives on religion. OK, now the reason I propose religion is because the passage mentioned words like (holy, prophets, Jewish). But after reading the poem over and over again, I realized that the poem wasn't about religion. The poem is about a subject that lives on or near a "mountains" with a friend. Again, I'm assuming that the subject is probably homeless and lacks hope according to the line, "We live on a holy mountain where the crows and the Crown Plaza rise higher than our expectations." They don't expect much or anything positive being that they describe the clouds calling "doom doom." The term "doom" is associated with damnation. The poem states that "Our lives are wrapped up in newsprint," in other words their lives are bland and dull because newsprint is black and white. Towards the end, the friend wishes to cut her head off to allow all of the memories run out. This is referring to the terrible lives that Jewish lived in ancient history, so the friend wishes that the memories can be told the exact way they were experienced. The weights being lifted in the third to last line are symbolic to baggage and burdens that they have to endure.