Volume 19 289various promises he had made in his life and his
poetry.” Murphy also suggested that the final lines
of the poem, about the waking that comes with each
dawn, might be interpreted in terms of the poet’s
increasing awareness of his responsibilities to his
community and his obligation to the future.Criticism
Bryan Aubrey
Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English and has pub-
lished many articles on twentieth century literature.
In this essay, Aubrey discusses Snyder’s poem in
terms of Robert Bly’s concept of “double conscious-
ness,” as well as shamanism and Zen Buddhism.In the volume of poems he selected and intro-
duced entitled News of the Universe: Poems of
Twofold Consciousness(1980), poet Robert Bly
sketches a history of poetry in terms of the kind of
human awareness it expresses. What he calls the
“old position,” which includes most poetry written
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as-
sumes that consciousness existed only in humans
and was best expressed through reason, or the in-
tellect. Nature was separate from humans, who be-
lieved themselves to be superior to it. Bly calls this
period “the peak of human arrogance.” During the
romantic era in the early nineteenth century, there
was a concerted attack on this position, in the work
of Goethe, Hölderlin and Novalis in Germany, and
Blake, Wordsworth and others in England. The ro-
mantics were conscious of a unity in the universe
beyond the subject-object relationship with which
humans were conditioned to perceive the world.
For the romantics, nature was alive with con-
sciousness; it was not a dead thing separate from
man. As Wordsworth put it in “Lines Written a Few
Miles above Tintern Abbey,” he felt:
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused.
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Bly finds the kind of unity of consciousness
expressed in romanticism continuing as an under-
ground stream even in the heyday of modernism in
the early part of the twentieth century. He cites as
examples the work of Robert Frost, William Car-los Williams, and D. H. Lawrence, among others.
After World War II, fresh poetic voices took up the
same vision, even though it was not (and still is
not) the dominant poetic tradition in American lit-
erature. Bly calls this vision “double conscious-
ness,” meaning that the poet is aware not only of
consciousness residing inside himself but also out-
side himself in the animal, plant and even mineral
world. Quoting the poet Juan Ramón Jimenez, Bly
also uses the term “full consciousness” to describe
this way of perceiving self and world.
One of the poets named by Bly in this context
is Snyder. It is this “full consciousness” that much
of Snyder’s poetry seems to capture, and this is very
apparent in “True Night.” The first part of the poem
seems at first glance to be an example of what Bly
means by the “old position”: man trying to control
nature, preparing to take a stick to it if any part of
it should disturb his comfort, such as the attempted
attack by the poet on the raccoons. But, a careful
reading of these lines suggests that something else
is at work also.
When the poet declares in lines 14 and 15 of
stanza 1, “I’m a huge pounding demon / That roars
at raccoons” he is surely describing himself not the
way he sees himself, but how the raccoons must see
him. It is the equivalent of a sudden switch in point
of view, a bursting beyond the confines of the in-
dividual consciousness to see with the eyes of the
“other.” The persona of the poem actually seems
unaware that this is happening and slips back into
normal everyday consciousness immediately, but it
is surely a significant moment. It recalls D. H.
Lawrence’s poem “Fish,” a prolonged effort by the
poet to penetrate the being of a fish, to project him-
self into “fish consciousness.” The poem includes the
following lines, after the poet imagines the horror ex-
perienced by the fish when caught: “And I, a many-
fingered horror of daylight to him, / Have made him
die.” “The many-fingered horror” is the equivalent
of the “pounding demon” in “True Night.”
Snyder has had a long interest in the shaman-
ism often associated with the Native American tra-
dition. It is this that gives him the gift, poetically
speaking, of seeing into, or fully participating in,
the consciousness of beings other than himself. In
The Real Work, Snyder described shamanism as “a
teaching from the nonhuman”; it involves “a sense
of communication with all of life’s network.” It is
this that is so prominent a feature of “True Night.”
It is Snyder’s equally long-held interest in Zen
Buddhism that is responsible for the fact that “True
Night” expresses in its middle section the kind ofTrue Night67082 _PFS_V19truen 283 - 310 .qxd 9/16/2003 10:00 M Page 289