Riddles on the Surface

“You see the palm trees, they tell you anything is possible.”

- Terrence Malick, ​Knight of Cups

What did Malick mean exactly? What are the trees telling me? Is my childhood up in the

trees, or are there some deities? How have these symbols manifested? Why might these trees want to warn me of climate change? Is the slim shade from the frail fronds my refuge from the scorching sun? I burn with rapt contemplation. For me, growing up in a desert full of palm trees has always made them nostalgic, and recently they have become a symbol of hopeful transplant since I found out that most of them in southern California have been imported from other parts of the world. Now, I cautiously wonder why I might project such emotional connotations to a tree, let alone nature at large. Gary Snyder is another thinker that might have contemplated similarly of trees, and even the masses of nature. This paper aims to explore the connotations riddled throughout his poem, “Ripples on the Surface.” Snyder is at his best when describing nature as it is, but where this poem in particular boasts poetic clarity, there lacks some concreteness of what he means to make clear apart from the objective poetics.

Contemplation: The Poem Spoken by an Autobiographical Writer, and The Epigraph

The opening of the poem possibly reads as an epigraph, initiating the tone of contemplation that looms throughout it. It starts with a curious three lined stanza that begins and ends with bookending quotation marks:

“Ripples on the surface of the water--
were silver salmon passing under--different
from the ripples caused by breezes” (1-3)
First of all, who is speaking these lines? Is it a typical “speaker of the poem,” or is it

Snyder himself? Are these lines actually spoken, or are they internal thoughts processed to paper? There is no authoritative answer, but Snyder seems to know nature by a long-lived experience, as opposed to knowing about it through observations made in occasional passing. Given what he knows about nature, as well as knowing that he possibly aims to write accounts as true to the experience of it, it could be appropriate to think that instead of taking up the position of a conventional “speaker of the poem,” he writes from an autobiographical perspective.

With this notion, it might be possible that these lines come from thoughts, or notes made, from observing a body of water. The lines have either been mentally queued for later recall, or jotted down in writing for revision. As it is written, the observation was that ripples on the surface of water are created, and it was by a force of nature in the form of an animal: salmon. The ripples were caused by the swimming fish that moved close enough to the surface of the water to disturb the calm. Those sort of ripples are distinguishable from the ripples caused by a different force of nature in the form of an element: wind. Furling winds blow over the surface of water, creating a wave if it is strong enough, or a ripple if it is gentle enough. Though I am able to expand on the visualization of the scene, and how it occurs by further explanation, Snyder’s approach is more reductionist. For him, recounting his experience in contained lines, with minimal words, and little eloquence is an intentional approach for describing nature.

Understanding that he is writing from the actuality of his experience is key to discovering a possible purpose of this poem.
Demonstration: The Performance of Nature, Written As It Is

Instead of explicitly trying to redefine nature in definitive terms, Snyder explores a different way to think of it through his writing. If there is any claim in the poem that is clear, he states it in the last lines of the second stanza:

--Nature not a book, but a ​performance​, a high old culture (8-9)

How is a “performance” so different from a “book”? What he possibly means by saying nature is a “performance” rather than a “book” is that nature is an action, or a series of them, taking place continuously. Perhaps when he says “a / high old culture” he might be trying to cultivate, or develop a better sense of what nature is apart from a literary view, returning to traditions found in history as reference. “Performance” might then be referred to old performances, such as dance or oration. In regards to “book,” he possibly wanted to avoid the literary usage of tropes and schemes found in prose and poetry, as figurative language or structural manipulation could skew the meaning or situation of a scene. He is attributing an understanding of nature by way of metaphor, but despite metaphor being a kind of poetic device, he largely describes it without use of stylized or decorated description.

Snyder’s claim reimagines nature through metaphor, and to best understand what he meant by “performance” is by acknowledging it as the tenor, and identifying its vehicle. Reading closer on the previous lines before his claim:

A scudding plume on the wave--

a humpback whale is
breaking out in air up
gulping herring (4-7)
These lines demonstrate how nature is a performance; he is describing nature as it is. The

-ing forms, or present participles, of “scudding,” “breaking,” and “gulping” precisely accentuate the image of continuous action. In this sense, the action of a feather being pushed by the wave, and a whale breaking through the surface of water with a mouthful of fish, becomes the vehicle of the metaphor; the vehicle of nature as performance.

Reflection: Pausing at The Ecocenter of the Poem

Despite the poem being clear in its thought and intention in the previous stanzas, Snyder writes the third stanza as if he is taking a moment to abstract a thought and leave room for rumination. He writes:

Ever-fresh events
scraped out, rubbed out, and used, used, again--
the braided channels of the rivers
hidden under fields of grass-- (10-13)
What did he mean by “ever-fresh events?” What he meant is not readily known, but

“ever-fresh” might mean more clearly “always-new.” Why describe the actions in the second line with staccato like diction? There are some schemes at work. Consonance is clear at the end of the words, “scraped,” and “rubbed,” along with the stuttered “used.” The word “out” may also qualify as consonance, along with being qualified as an epistrophe since it was repeated. The schemes create a sense of orderly, and laboring repetition. Given these connotations, what could Snyder be trying to do in these two lines? The answer lies in the details of the lines that follow. Further probing down the second line, it ends with an em dash caesura, but the em dash also serves as an enjambment to the following lines. It is written, “...again-- / the braided channels of the rivers / hidden under fields of grass--” (10-12) The em dash returns to close at the end of the stanza. There are similar usages of the em dash throughout the poem, notably with the contrasted ripples in stanza one, and the didactic performance in stanza two, but this stanza seems to use it in more abstract fashion. If, starting from the enjambment, the lines were to be read knowing that it may be an anastrophe, then it is possible to extract a better distinction for understanding the situation Snyder is trying to depict.

Furthermore, the scene he depicts when writing “the braided channels of the rivers/ hidden under fields of grass--,” (11-12) seems to be like an estuary. If Snyder is continuing to write throughout the poem by observation, he may be standing in an estuary and reflecting on the landscape. By understanding the stanza in its entirety, from analyzing each line on the micro level, to connecting one another as a macro, the potential ecocentrism of the poem is revealed. In his observation, the estuary is always experiencing new events, and he reflects on how it is in constant change and labor. Perhaps by erosion, or maybe by industry; by nature, or by humans. Though there is heavy usage of literary devices in this stanza alone, unlike the previous stanzas, they aid in understanding the literary and natural landscape riddled throughout this portion of the poem.
Returning to Contemplation by Double Entendres

Moving away from formal experimentation, which seemingly built on a whole, Snyder compacts the entirety of his poem into the last stanza. The first four lines of the stanza reads:

The vast wild
the house, alone.

The little house in the wild,
the wild in the house. (13-16)

What is most notable about these lines is that Snyder begins to write with conventional punctuation by properly utilizing a period and comma. There are also indentations in the lines, but they seem to create an intentional parallelism. Chiasmus may be extracted from these lines given that they stand out from the rest of the stanza, yet look closely related to each other. Drawing such a conclusion requires understanding what is being described, and what Snyder might mean by it.

For clarity, these lines could be rewritten with further description like so: in the vast wild a house that stands alone, and within that house lies another wild. What is the wild, is it nature? Does it pertain to primal, or human nature? There is a bit of antithetical quality to its usage here. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “wild” in various ways, and I pose a single definition in this context. The wild is of a place or region: uncultivated or uninhabited. This definition emphasizes a sense of a wild existence within the home itself, and the wild existence that surrounds it. “Uncultivated” is the key word of the definition, it recalls Snyder’s notion of “a high old culture.” The lone house stands in nature, which was a landscape once uncultivated and uninhabited before the house was constructed. Is it still wild and natural now that a house is there? Why would one build a house in the middle of nature? Maybe Snyder hears echoes of Thoreau rippling through the waters in observation, and that the house was built there for someone to live a deliberate life out in the wild. That might mean the person in the house is doing their own cultivating work in a life deliberately lived. How different, or the same, might the wild within the house be to the wild outside? Though Snyder might not have a direct response, the following lines of the poem close with an ambiguous claim that provides some insight.

The dichotomy between the wild-outside and the wild-inside are synecdoches that wane when Snyder speaks, like A. R. Ammons, of nature in the sense of an Overall. It is difficult to say that writing to encapsulate the whole of nature is beyond Snyder’s capacity, but it is clear that attempting to is within his will when he writes:

Both forgotten

No nature
Both together, one big empty house. (18-20)

If what is forgotten refers to the wild-outside and the wild-inside, then who has forgotten them? Maybe Snyder is addressing himself and acknowledging how he might have forgotten of them. He could also be claiming that someone else, maybe civilization at large, has forgotten. The answer is not clear, and the mystery continues in the following curious one-liner, “No nature.” For clarity, it might mean that there is no nature left in an agriculturally and industrial driven economy. Or, it could mean that no nature exists separately. This would entail that saying human-nature or primal-nature are double negative terms, and that realizing nature as all-encompassing is necessary in the process of understanding it in an overall sense. Or, he might mean “no” to be “know” so that people know better about nature, and what is at stake when one's actions take effect on it. Despite the dichotomy between the last few lines, there is a unity of human and nature when considering the whole of earth. The very last line reads, “Both together, one big empty house.” The house in the wild, and the wild itself are together under the roof of earth--the big empty house. If this poem was a call to action for some sort of ecoactivism, then why use such grave mysterious language at the end? Why not be hopeful, and at least say that the house is “full” instead of empty? Why be vague instead of posing the grave situation with explicit and extreme language? Taking action in better understanding that nature exists as an ongoing process, or in Snyder’s case a performance, is one way to begin participating; however, the poem is not explicitly asking for any action to be taken for nature. It instead reimagines nature through a subtle ecopoetic lens. This is the crux of the poem. The answers lie within the inquiry of it. At best, it is keen and observant of nature, but it veers away from defining any bold claims that it makes so that one can be made of or from it.