For Gary Snyder, the landscape is a muse for the imagination. Once a spiritual student in Japan, he incorporates the Zen Buddhism he studied and adopted in his poems, which meshes curiously yet kindly with the primitivism his pastoral inclinations nurture. The ground is an analeptic of sorts—it offers a cure, the prerequisites of which are a return to our origins which can never be divorced from the soil. As a contemporary poet, Snyder recognizes the one-way departure man risks to take from the earth in search of artificial and superficial things. His project seems to be to reacquaint readers with the splendor of that which existed before—and will exist long after—them, to reorient themselves in the world as natives, rather than aliens. His poem, “Wave”, is a meditation on energy in its endless forms. In addition to the literal wave as a manifestation of energy, Snyder intersperses the poem with a recurring image of a woman, easily interpreted as mother nature, who supplies the earth and its inhabitants with the energy they, too, contain. The poet opens with a laundry list of natural objects, which all are affected by and seemingly affect the natural flow of energy in the universe. This initial stanza reads:
Grooving clam shell, streakt through marble, sweeping down ponderosa pine…show more content… Furthermore, he is not active and is not assigned a verb as the rest were. Rather than agent, he is the object, sometimes getting “stuck in the thickets” or being “flung wide”. He almost seems to even estrange his sense of selfhood, his “me”, from his “mind”, for “the dancing grain” of his mind is the what has left him flung. He is subject to this eternal wave, but not made victim or opponent to it, rather a passenger or fellow traveler, along for the