MID AUGUST AT SOURDOUGH MOUNTAIN LOOKOUT

Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder was born on May 8, 1930, in San Francisco. He has published numerous books of poetry and prose, and also had achieved numerous awards including an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Levinson Prize from poetry, the Robert Kirsch lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Times, the Shelley Memorial Award etc., and most recently, he was announced as the recipient of the 2012 Wallace Stevens Awards for lifetime achievement by the Academy of American Poets. He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American poets in 2003.

Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout by Gary Snyder is a quiet meditative type of poem in which the persona meditates upon a landscape that he describes. The poem begins like a descriptive poem, but is a serious meditation upon an American rural landscape, and upon the people who have literally and metaphorically left it behind when they went after the lure of the city civilization. This poem is a very good example of imagistic poetry for its visual expression. Divided into two stanzas, the poem captures a moment that fuses two experiences of the speaker: the present and the past, physical and mental.

Gary Snyder wrote this poem when he was a forest firewatcher. In the first stanza of the poem, Snyder has four things progress over time. There is the first image over a smoke haze. Being a forest firewatcher, he would see this every now and then. There are then three days of heat and five days of rain. Fir-cones appear in this bundle of images followed by a swarm of flies.

Time is a big idea that Snyder talks about. The flies that have lived there have only been around for a few days. Then there is the rain that has been around for even longer. The trees and the fir-cones have been there for years; and finally the mountains and valleys have been around for thousands and thousands of years. Each one of these elements has seen time in different ways at different speeds. Snyder sees that is how people live their lives; there are those who live it as if it were their last, then there are those who live like they have a thousand years. What Snyder wants to say is that we have to live both.

The poet throughout the poem depicts a clear picture of the scene that has gone past five day’s rain and three days’ heat, now smoke rising up from the valley, road shining, swarms (groups) of new flies flying all over. The persona positions him on the top of a hill from which he is visualizing the scene. Perhaps this scene tickles (pleases) him about his past, company of friends, merrymaking and much more.

But memory is like surrounding. He is lost in the present, forgets what he read in the past. We can trace a sense of isolation when he thinks that these colleagues are in cities. The last three lines capture the romantic mood of the speaker who is now lost in his present state, enjoying the cold snow water and a sight of the valley. The poem echoes William Carlos Williams ‘Red Wheelbarrow’ for its amazing capture of the moment. The reader experiences this moment as lively as the speaker feels. The poem can also be read as an instance of the poetic creation itself. The persona, with his imagination capable of creating the world beyond the horizons, is a typical romantic being.

The first stanza is typically descriptive; and second stanza is meditative. Snyder creates a mosaic (variety) with different, images attached together like ‘smoked haze’, ‘heat,’ ‘rain’, ‘glowing pitch’, ‘fit-cones,’ ‘rock meadows ‘flies’ in the first stanza which make a complete scene. This scenario reminds the speaker of his friends, those with whom he grew up and befriended as a child and young man. He cannot remember things and all his friends. Many friends are now in the cities. Then he imagines that his friends might be drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup. This clue in the poem suggests that the speaker is not familiar with the life and standards of the city people. What he describes as “snow-water from tin cup” may mean beer in tin cans. 

The speaker further imagines that his friends may be “looking down for miles/through high still air”. This imagination is also ironical. Despite his simple-minded faith in his past friends, it is unlikely the busy city people will have time to remember this poor friend back in the village. But the idea of the thing is better than the thing itself! The persona’s sweet memories and the hope that the friends are still looking back towards the village is striking.