Wave By Gary Snyder Analysis

For Gary Snyder, the landscape is a muse for the imagination. Once a spiritual student in Japan, he incorporates the Zen Buddhism he studied and adopted in his poems, which meshes curiously yet kindly with the primitivism his pastoral inclinations nurture. The ground is an analeptic of sorts—it offers a cure, the prerequisites of which are a return to our origins which can never be divorced from the soil. As a contemporary poet, Snyder recognizes the one-way departure man risks to take from the earth in search of artificial and superficial things. His project seems to be to reacquaint readers with the splendor of that which existed before—and will exist long after—them, to reorient themselves in the world as natives, rather than aliens. His poem, “Wave”, is a meditation on energy in its endless forms. In addition to the literal wave as a manifestation of energy, Snyder
Riprap echoes this listing of naturally occurring products of the earth’s never-ending action, most keenly with the line “Granite: ingrained / with torment of fire and weight”. Granite is formed when molten rock wedges between other rocks in the surface of the Earth and cools, leaving behind crystals which make the rock prime pickings for countertops across the kitchens of America. Similarly, the marble of “streakt through marble” would have been formed upon limestone’s exposure to intense heat and pressure. Marble was quickly scooped up as the optimal material by sculptors of antiquity and, Taj Mahal—a building from the 17th century—remains one of today’s most renowned buildings, for its architectural splendor above all. The following subject, “rip-cut tree grain” finally introduces, almost explicitly perhaps, human interference to these natural materials; “rip-cut” beckons the image of a saw slicing a tree trunk into