Snyder "Lumber Strike" an Analysis of Gary Essay

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Snyder "Lumber Strike"

An Analysis of Gary Snyder's "Lumber Strike"

Gary Snyder's "The Late Show & Lumber Strike of the Summer of Fifty-Four" is at once both a poem about an historical incident that shutdown production lines in the Northwest Lumber industry in 1954 and a poem that transcends time and space to contemplate existence. A beat poet whose imagery often tends to linger on the natural world, Snyder uses a still moment in an otherwise usually bustling setting of outdoor industry to look around at the glory of the natural world, of which he is only allowed a momentary glimpse before he must return to civilization to "stand in line" for work. What Snyder finds, however, in the natural world where all labor has ceased is more than words can describe: it is a transient place -- a kind of limbo "between heaven and earth" -- where some wisdom may be intuited (but what exactly we are not told). This paper will show how Snyder uses imagery to create allegory: a hike that symbolizes a kind of pilgrimage toward an unspecified truth before returning to the world.

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It may be argued that the poem is simply a depiction of the speaker's situation: a reflection of the lumber strike that shutdown work for months in 1954: "Whole towns shut down… / Chainsaws in a pool of cold oil" -- the vision is of a ghost town where the bodies (the workers' tools) lie in a puddle of their own blood. The loggers have all gone. Nature is quiet -- yet there is a sorrow that is as of yet undefined. The speaker in Snyder's poem is merely gliding through the scene, taking note of the emptiness which brings two thoughts to mind: first, the vastness and beauty of nature; and second, the sorrow at having to leave it to return to the city.

These two thoughts, of course, do not come until the second half of the poem. The first part only describes the situation: the absence of work and, therefore, the absence of life in the Northwest. The speaker then begins a pilgrimage to seek some higher ground,….....

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