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Place, Love, and Time: This Poem is for Deer (Without
Footnotes)
Gary Snyder’s, This Poem is for Deer (No Nature, 49), draws
attention to a chief tenet held by Snyder, that is of (wo)man’s
rejection of his natural environment and the interrelatedness of
all species (Molesworth, 32). Through this pattern of humanistic
thought, Snyder establishes place by means of anti-place, where
man has lost his standing in the food chain, and thus in the natural
environment as a whole, by disregard and disrespect of other animals.
Snyder identifies compassion as an irrevocable law of interaction
within the earth community, and so, shows love in this poem by means
of anti-love. Time is represented in the text through tenses of
past and present, where Snyder elevates the primitive; mythological,
self-aware, and reverent, directly against the modern man; who is
ignorant, selfish, and displaced.
Snyder explains in his essay, Poetry and the Primitive, that the
nature of “hunting” is inherently sacred and an act
of communion between animals and people, through what is known as
“hunting magic” (Earth House Hold, 117). “Hunting
magic is designed to bring the game to you—the creature has
heard your song, witnessed your sincerity, and out of compassion
comes within your range” (120). Snyder presents the act of
hunting within Deer, though he does not portray it in any manner
that would inspire “compassion.” At first, the speaker,
participating in the hunt, “Missed a last shot / At the buck,
in twilight.” As the stanza continues, time is elapsed, and
the speaker is driving down a back road, “…sliding /
on dry needles through cold pines,” where we can suspect he’s
driving drunk. The speaker then commits an act of sacrilege, forfeiting
the communal act of hunting, where he “…scared out a
cottontail / Whipped up the Winchester / Shot off its head.”
There is no honor in this slaughter, and due to the speakers somewhat
altered state of mind, no self awareness, no thanks. A line from
Practice of the Wild(1990) comes to mind, where deer “[do]
not mind being killed and eaten as food, but they expect us to say
please (italics mine), and thank you…” (20). The brutality
of the incident and the state of mind of the narrator is later described
within the text of the poem: “on the lonely road / A mile
past the mill-pond, / With the car stopped, shot / That wild silly
blinded creature down.” The insulting, imprudent diction tells
us the speaker objectified the dear, and perhaps sheds guilt by
naming it “wild,” “silly,” and “blinded.”
The deer is further abused by its treatment, where the speaker “Pull[s]
out the hot guts / with hard bare hands….” Snyder then
instills the poem with a spiritual quality, where after physical
death, the deer refuses to actually die for the man. The speaker,
now feeling guilt stronger than before, collapses by the sea in
repent: “Deer don’t want to die for me,” he yells,
as he begins drinking brackish water as some sort of punishment,
“…until the deer come down to die / in pity for my pain.”
The man sobs as the deer’s cold, limp tongue bleeds down the
chrome of his car.
The idea of love is understood through its antithesis, where no
compassion, only needless guilt and pain are present. In the hunt,
we can conceive of how this situation went awry: the speaker killed
the deer without being aware of his actions, and no respect was
exchanged during the execution. The deer did not “out of passion
come in to [his] range,” but instead happened on to it by
chance. If he instead hit the deer on his first attempt, we can
suspect the deer would have no problem with letting it’s life
go for the hunter.
The following section concerns itself with the food chain, where
narration jumps sporadically between animals on land and in the
sea, who have their place as both hunter and hunted. The reader
is given a broad range of imagery in which to see this web. Snyder
offers a picture of sea life, where “Sealion, salmon, offshore—
/ …Coast, and up creek, big seeds / Groping for inland womb,”
for observation. He assigns the system of hunter and prey as a kind
of ceremony, a willing exchange between animals, as the “blind
fish” explains: “ ‘My petrel, snow-tongued kiss
her a brook her mouth / of smooth pebbles her tongue a bed.’”
Here the fish is content and comforted to be slain by the petrel,
cold and painful as it must be. Later, this placement in the food
chain is further exemplified through the narration of the skunk,
“’I kill everything… / …only the wolves
scare me, / I have a chiefs tail.’” Coyote however,
is given no place, but instead assumes the top with his brutal,
savage treatment of other species. The lines are beautifully and
terribly scrawled:
On the rainy boulders
On the bloody sandbar
I ate the spawned-out salmon
I went crazy
Covered with ashes
Gnawing the girls breasts
Marrying women to whales
Or dogs, I’m a priest too
I raped your wife
I’ll eat your corpse
Coyote’s bloodthirsty narration is reminds us of the intoxicated
hunter’s lines in the beginning of the poem, where the deer
is murdered and torn to pieces without grace. We can now perceive
the Coyote figure as human and a microcosm for what we do as a society.
If you need to change “energy” to “animals,”
lines from Charles Molesworth’s Gary Snyder’s Vision
(1983) make good sense:
By failing to honor the immanent order and energy structure of
his immediate natural surroundings, man is driven to exercise uses
of energy and raw material. From this misuse springs modern society,
but also the massive set of cultural expectations that accompany
and support such unnatural misappropriation (32).
Proceeding all this jabber on food chains and such, the poet declares,
“How rare to be born a human being!” For two stanzas,
the tense in this section is shifted to before the above is true,
to where the primitive human is held above the modern incarnation,
and humans respected all things, and took nothing for granted. The
primitive human is then seen as the Buddha, the all-knowing, all-compassionate,
enlightened one, proclaiming, “I alone am the honored one.”
Here we are presented a scene unlike the others, where the human
is not displaced but instead loved and welcomed by other species,
as they give him presents in commemoration. The closing line of
this tense echoes as the reader recites it: “Truth being the
sweetest of flavors,” where “truth” is the interrelatedness
and kindness held between all species, humans included.
This “truth” and “place” within the nature
community is shown as something we once had but lost over the course
of our existence. In the closing stanza of this poem, Snyder attempts
a solution to our denial of interrelatedness, writing, “…bacchantes,
drunk / on wine or truth, what you will, / Meaning: Compassion.”
This “compassion” is the solution he presents; meaning
love, acceptance, and admiration for all species. He continues,
“Agents: man and beast…” stating that these two
must hold this compassion. But in the end, the poet admits the solution
is a failed cause, at least for now, concluding, “…beasts
/ Got the buddha nature / All but / Coyote.” We see the narrator
as hopeful, but discouraged, hoping one day humanity might wake
up and reclaim its “buddha nature.”
Bibliography:
Molesworth, Charles. Gary Snyder’s Vision. University of
Missouri, 1983.
Peiffer, Katrina, S. Coyote at Large. University of Utah Press,
1969.
Snyder, Gary. Earth House Hold. New York. New Directions, 1966.
Snyder, Gary. No Nature: New and Selected Poems. New York. Pantheon
Books, 1992.
Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. New York. North Point Press,
1990.
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