Turtle Island Themes Part 2

This time around, I read "It Pleases", "Pine Tree Tops", and "The Uses of Light" from Gary Snyder's "Turtle Island" and compared the three poems.  From my last post, a common theme in Snyder's poetry is how humans are destroying nature and the world around them.  However, with this second set of three poems, a more common theme is that humans have no connection with nature.

In "It Pleases", for example, Snyder argues that the earth is the center of all power in the world and drives all actions.  As much as humans may try to control nature, the earth is the supreme ruler and humans attempts are solely in vain.  Another example would be from the poem "Pine Tree Tops".  Snyder describes a night scene where the narrator views the tree tops fading into the night time sky.  In an appeal to the audience's senses, he compares the creak of boots to the animal tracks.  The boots creaking represents how unnatural the human presence is compared to the animal tracks that are naturally embedded onto the ground.  Snyder closes the poem with the question "what do we know?", which challenges the reader to contemplate their knowledge of the world compared to how naturally all other life coexists.  

The most powerful example of how humans have no connection with nature came to me in Snyder's poem "The Uses of Light".  This poem has the narrator listening to the stones, trees, moths, and deer in nature as they teach him the lessons their way of life and how they survive in accordance with nature.  In the final stanza, nature calls the narrator to climb the towering building that humans built on the ground, but instead of going about the daily business routines, to just gaze out the windows, and with each floor, he can see a thousand miles more.  By calling the human to ignore his daily routine as to just take time to look out and appreciate nature, the animals say that he can see "a thousand miles more".  With one floor's elevation, one thousand miles cannot be viewed, but the thousand miles could be in relation to not only sight, but also general knowledge and appreciation for nature and the way the world works without human influence.

In all three poems, Snyder makes it evident that humans have no connection with nature or the way that the world works.  By combining this theme with the theme found in the last three poems, a more general theme or statement summarizing Snyder's message can be found: humans are drastically reducing their understanding of how to live with nature, and with less of a connection, nature is slowly being destroyed.