Poetry for Students

290 Poetry for Students

mental transformation, an emptying of the individ-

ual mind, that is the goal of meditation in the Bud-

dhist and other Eastern religious traditions. This

can be seen in the way that the poet gradually sinks

into the essence of the night. This process can be

understood metaphorically as the mind sinking into

deeper levels of itself, where the restless ego is

stilled and there is a sense of peace and oneness.

InThe Real Work, Snyder compares meditation, an

act that takes the mind from surface levels to deeper

levels, to the act of “still hunting”:

Still hunting is when you take a stand in the brush or

some place and then become motionless, and then

things begin to become alive, and pretty soon you be-

gin to see the squirrels and sparrows and raccoons

and rabbits that were there all the time but just, you

know, duck out of the way when you look at them

too closely.

This “still hunting” of the mind that leads to

the loss of the individual self in the boundless ex-

pansiveness of (in the language of this poem) the

night, is conveyed in subtle ways. It is accom-

plished not only through the words themselves, but

in the punctuation and the arrangement of the words

of the page. For example, at the end of stanza 4, in

the lines “crickets still cricketting / Faint in cold

coves in the dark,” there is no punctuation mark af-

ter “dark” at the end of the line. Grammatically, a

period is called for and would certainly have been

used had this been prose writing. The lack of any

punctuation at all creates for the reader an effect of

open-endedness, the feeling that this particular

“dark” may well go on and on without end.

The effect is repeated with even greater force

at the end of stanza seven. There is no period, or

any other punctuation mark, after “In this dark.” A

period is surely to be expected here, since the next

stanza clearly begins a new sentence. The effect is

to once more reinforce the meaning. The dark is

endless; it represents, metaphorically speaking, an

experience of eternity within the quiet of the poet’s

consciousness. The absence of punctuation, cou-

pled with the expanse of white space on the page

that immediately follows the phrase, helps to give

the reader the experience of a “dark” that opens out

(like the sea anemone in stanza five) into the end-

lessness of the blank white space on the page—the

equivalent of the blank fullness/emptiness of the

poet’s own mind at this point.

A similar effect is noticeable in stanza 5, which

has no punctuation at all until the period at the end,

even though one might expect a period after either

“hair” at the end of line 3, or after “pines,” at the

end of line 5, or even after “beds” at the end of line

2. The effect of the absence of punctuation is to
   make it impossible to sort out which subject (either
   “I turn” or “I feel”) the dependent clauses belong
   to. The lack of punctuation conveys the seamless-
   ness of the state of mind the poet describes. Just as
   the experience of oneness with nature is different
   from that of normal waking consciousness, since it
   breaks up the distinctions habitually made between
   self and world, so too the absence of punctuation
   thwarts the reader’s expectations, leaving him or
   her without the usual guideposts that help to cre-
   ate meaning.
   It is not unusual for Snyder to use methods
   such as this. As Jody Norton, in “The Importance
   of Nothing: Absence and Its Origins in the Poetry
   of Gary Snyder” (reprinted in Critical Essays on
   Gary Snyder), states:
   When conventionally required elements are omitted
   from linguistic structures... their meanings are con-
   sequently problematized. But Snyder’s procedures
   are aimed at more than merely confounding the un-
   derstanding. His purpose is to use the grammatical,
   syntactical, and semantic spaces that permeate even
   language... to make possible a kind of immediate
   knowing that language is not theoretically designed
   to produce.
   Of course, the meaning of “True Night,” as the
   concluding stanzas show, lies not so much in the
   experience of oneness with nature but in the need
   to return to the world of human relationships and
   responsibilities. No one can remain in that medita-
   tive state forever, because humans have to function
   in the world. People’s bonds and relationships with
   each other are just as important as the mind-ex-
   panding practices of meditation.

True Night

Of course, the

meaning of ‘True Night,’ as

the concluding stanzas

show, lies not so much in

the experience of oneness

with nature but in the need

to return to the world of

human relationships and

responsibilities.”

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