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:

                                            Paradise Lost

                           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  

                                       Read it here.

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.”