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Essay on Three Poems, One Theme: Nature's Perception of Time

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In three poems – "Old Woodrat's Stinky House", "The Mountain Spirit", and "Boat of a Million Years" – Gary Snyder uses the concept of deep time to show us how nature views time and implies that humanity needs to be able to see time the same way. Snyder's poems imply that he believes people have forgotten their place in the natural world and that we should try to regain our respect for nature. "Old Woodrat's Stinky House" explains what is wrong with how we perceive time. "The Mountain Spirit" shows why nature views time as more like a singular thing than a series of segments like humans do. "Boat of a Million Years" hints at a solution and implies that we should relax and follow nature's example. First, the poem "Old Woodrat's Stinky …show more content…

The poet is also implicitly telling us that we are ruining our planet by finishing the poem with:
–Coyote says "You people stay put here, learn your place, do good things. Me, I'm traveling on."
Coyote, the creator of the earth in this poem and often a deity of many First Nation cultures, is so disgusted with humanity that he decides to move on but he leaves with a message to "learn your place". Gary Snyder's poem implies that humanity has become detached with nature and that we need to learn our place and learn to stop "pissing on everything". Second, the poem "The Mountain Spirit" is about a dialogue between the poet's speaker (probably Gary Snyder himself) and a mountain spirit. "Ceaseless wheel of lives" the is first line of the poem – it is also repeated throughout the entire poem – is meant to show that life existed before and will continue to exist after mankind. The "Ceaseless wheel of lives" also suggests that time is not broken up into a series of segments. At one point in the poem, the mountain spirit remarks "But what do you know of minerals and stone". The mountain spirit's incredulity implies that Gary Snyder thinks people have a hard time understanding a large-scale view of time. Snyder goes on to tell a poem to the mountain spirit – a poem within a poem – that tells the story of the life of a mountain to illustrate how a mountain perceives time. The

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