Gary Snyder's "Milton by Firelight"
Many modern American poets write meditatively on the theme of time. Gary Snyder wrote “Milton by Firelight” in 1955, a free-verse
poem that beautifully embodies the ubi-sunt
theme ("Where are the snows of yesteryear?"). The poem develops a realistic image pattern, probably drawn
from Snyder’s time working as a
fire lookout on Crater Mountain in the Sierras. Can see the image pattern and its relation to the theme of mutability, the passage of time?
“Milton by Firelight”
Gary Snyder
“O
hell, what do mine eyes
with grief behold?”
Working with an old
Singlejack miner, who can sense
The vein and cleavage
In the very guts of rock, can
Blast granite, build
Switchbacks that last for
years
Under the beat of snow,
thaw, mule-hooves.
What use, Milton, a silly story
Of our lost general parents,
eaters of fruit?
The Indian, the chainsaw boy,
And a string of six mules
Came riding down to camp
Hungry for tomatoes and green apples.
Sleeping in saddle-blankets
Under a bright night-sky
Han River slantwise by morning.
Jays squall
Coffee boils
In ten thousand years the Sierras
Will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion.
Ice-scratched slabs and bent
trees.
No paradise, no fall,
Only the weathering land
The wheeling sky,
Man, with his Satan
Scouring the chaos of the mind.
Oh Hell!
Fire down
Too dark to read, miles from a road
The bell-mare clangs in the meadow
That packed dirt for a fill-in
Scrambling through loose rocks
On an old trail
All of a summer’s day.
Permission by Gary Snyder.
“Milton by Firelight” was originally published as part of Riprap by
Origin Press (1959) and subsequently in Riprap &
Cold Mountain Poems. Four Seasons Foundation, San Francisco, 1969.
The poem can be
found at
here.
As you read the poem, where do you see the
themes and images most clearly deepening each other’s significance? I would say
in these lines:
No paradise, no fall,
Only the weathering land
The wheeling sky. . .
“No
paradise, no fall” states the main theme of Snyder’s poem and explicitly
contradicts the main theme of Paradise
Lost. The other two lines are images associated by similarity and contrast.
“Land” and “sky” contrast, but “weathering” and “wheeling” are similar in sound
and more importantly in large motions, changes, one planetary and one cosmic.
We’ll need to develop this pattern as we participate in the poem.
“Stopping
by Woods” presents the fairly coherent thoughts and perceptions of the poet, although,
as we have seen, he feels the tension between the impulse to move on and the
pleasure of watching “the woods fill up with snow.” Frost’s words give us those
thoughts and perception in rhyme and meter. Snyder’s narrative of external
events and his meditation on Paradise
Lost and the two illusions of permanence, the landscape and Milton’s
religious mythology, come to us in fragmented non-sentences and juxtaposed
images. (Where does the memory of the Han River come from?) This poem is as far
from the norms of informational prose as it is from kitsch! Good for it!
We need to get the facts of the setting clear before
we begin constructing our meanings on these images and thematic meditations.
The speaker has been working with an old miner in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Before going to sleep, he has been reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost by light of the campfire. The day before, one of the
workers, an Indian boy, joined the poet and the old singlejack miner for
breakfast. Snyder fleetingly recalls a similar morning on the Han River in
Korea. But now, before sleep, he thinks of the book he’s reading, Paradise Lost, and ahead to the future
of the Sierras. But finally he closes the book and turns to go to sleep: “Fire
down / Too dark to read . . . / All of a
summer’s day.” We will certainly have to make some sense out of that last
unexpected line.
The first verse paragraph (not a stanza like
those in “Stopping by Woods”) introduces an old singlejack miner, a man who hammers a drill bit into hard rock
for planting dynamite charges. He has spent his life building mountain roads
that “last for years.” He’s old, but not quite as old as the granite rocks
to which he gives form. His roads stand up
“Under the beat of snow, thaw, mule-hooves”—the forces
doing the erosive work of time and nature. The poet admires the skill and
useful work of this old miner, but then breaks off and addresses Milton, whose
poem he has been reading nights before going to sleep.
What use, Milton, a silly story
Of our lost general parents,
eaters of fruit?
How do we make sense of
that apparent non sequitur, jumping
from the singlejack miner to Milton? The words “use” and “silly” are blocks for
our bridge building. Snyder considers the life’s work of this nameless
roadbuilder as useful as Milton’s “immortal” but “silly” poem.
Let’s participate
a little more deeply in Snyder’s non-kitsch, non-informational poem. We have three elements of form to
understand: 1) the image pattern, 2) the relevance of Paradise Lost, and 3) the theme of time in relation to the images. One difficulty is that the
image pattern is embedded in
the time frame and we’ve already seen that that is achronological. At
least we already know the passage that binds together the image pattern and the
main theme, the ineluctable passage of time. Keep it in mind: “No
paradise, no fall, / Only the weathering land / The wheeling sky.” Two theme words from the “silly”
story contrasted with two parallel images of unchanging change.
Snyder’s epigraph, “O Hell, what do
mine eyes with grief behold,” is from Paradise Lost, Book
IV. The words are Satan’s, spoken when he first invades Paradise
and sees the beautiful earth and “our . . . general parents,” Adam and Eve. “O Hell” is not
Satan cursing, but thinking
of his new much uglier abode
and comrades down below.
Snyder’s next verse paragraph juxtaposes to this
rejection of Milton’s story an Indian boy descending from higher on the
mountainside, “Hungry for tomatoes and green apples.” Informational prose would
provide a logical or narrative coherence linking Adam and Eve to the Indian
boy. But a retro-mod poem invites the participatory reader to sense an “interinanimation”
between the words “eaters of fruit” and “Hungry for tomatoes and green apples.”
This invitation is especially pointed since an apple is widely supposed to be
the forbidden fruit our “general parents” ate, bringing “death into the world
and all our woe.” If Snyder’s Indian boy had been hungry for flapjacks and salt
pork, the poem would not have allowed us to participate in this small construction
of aesthetic form.
A fleeting moment in time butts against Milton’s
timeless battle between God and Satan for human souls, and the prelapsarian “eaters
of fruit” are butted against a hungry boy. The images suggest the desirability
of the physical and fleeting while dismissing Milton’s predestined drama taking
place in eternity. The blur of images ceases to be confusing when the reader
sees that they are joined by their temporality. Time telescopes the boy’s
hunger for breakfast, the men sleeping under the wheeling bright stars, the
poet’s remembering a morning on the Han River, and the jays squalling as the
coffee boils.
Is Snyder just
expressing a
simple hedonism,
a
Hemingway-like
indulgence in
mere
physical sensation?
The next brief
verse
paragraph
disabuses
us of that simplistic
view. He is aware of
what
“ten
thousand years” will
do
to
the
Sierras and, by implication,
to
“the great globe
itself,” as
Prospero says in Shakespeare's
Tempest. (I have linked you to a
Shakespearean passage because of its fame and beauty as a presentation of the
Mutability theme. You will be able to return here. Please read it and come
back.)
Snyder’s
next-to-last
verse paragraph presents an image pattern of things rocky but life-sustaining
opposed to things eternal but useless and silly. This contrast gives way to a clear thematic
statement that
adjudicates
between the
opposing
images. Milton’s timeless
story
is
denied and
“the
weathering
land /
[and]
The wheeling
sky” are affirmed. If
you
are uncertain of how
the
earth
and sky
fit
into the pattern
I have just described, the
adjectives
weathering and
wheeling tell you that
earth and sky
are ever-changing. They are not
eternal and perfect and never will be. And
then Milton’s larger-than-life Satan is brought down to the human level.
He is “man’s Satan.” That he is “Scouring the chaos of the mind” gives a
participating reader pause. “Scouring” is a striking word here, not something
we easily imagine Satan doing. What! is he Cinderella? Hmmm. I hadn’t thought
of that before, but it is a possibility for this figure that lives with cinders
of burning brimstone. Man-made
Satan scours human mental chaos so that we will
not try to do any useful work, whether it is forming a poem or a switchback
road in the Sierras.
Snyder returns to the opening. The fire
is burning down, this time not hellfire. It’s
time to put Milton away—in
two contrasting senses of the word, away for the night and away forever as a
serious theologian and cosmologist. Images of
human construction, building a road
(“dirt for a fill-in”), amid the inner and outer chaos (“scrambling through
loose rocks”) in which we build, are all in a day’s work. A workful “summer
day” is better than a fantasy “forever.”
But the
poet
has not put Milton
away. Snyder
pointed
out
to me that the last
line
of
the
poem, “All of a
summer’s day,” alludes to the
fall of
Hephaestus
described in
Paradise Lost. Snyder writes,
I have one piece of information to share with you: the very last line
comes from "Paradise Lost" and is the length of
time it took Hephaestus to fall from heaven to hell as thrown by his father Zeus. v. Iliad
589-593. I was carrying that book
with me and reading while working
on back country trails in the northern Yosemite, summer of 1955.
The relevant passage from
Milton describes Hephaestus’ (Mulciber’s) fall:
thrown by angry
Jove
Sheer over the crystal battlements: from morn
To noon he fell, from noon to dewy
eve,
A summer’s day; and with the setting sun
Dropt from the zenith like a falling star….
Paradise Lost,
Book I, 741-45
Scroll
down to the appropriate lines or better yet read your way there.
Snyder’s “Milton by Firelight” prefers the world of “the weathering land and the wheeling sky” to John Milton’s imagined world
of eternal perfection, temporal
trial, and eternal torment—“a silly
story.”
