To get to Sourdough Mountain Lookout, you hike a good five miles and gain 5000 feet or more of elevation. The terrain is rugged and the hiking strenuous, but that’s to be expected in the Northern Cascades. Located 130 miles northeast of Seattle, Washington, the Forest Service opened one of its first lookouts here in 1915. The view from the lookout station, constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933, is a postcard in every direction: Mount Prophet and Hozomeen looking north, Jack Mountain out east, Pyramid and Colonial Peaks to the south with Ross and Diablo lakes directly below, and, as if not to be outdone, the Picket Range is off to the west. This is impressive country and you can understand why it’s been an inspiration to poets Almost I want to say “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout” is a kind of haiku-sonnet, with an imagistic opening stanza followed by a “turn” in the second stanza -- a turn to the “I,” whereas before the “I,” if not the “eye,” was absent. Here is the poem in its entirety: Down valley a smoke haze Three days heat, after five days rain Pitch glows on the fir-cones Across rocks and meadows Swarms of new flies. I cannot remember things I once read A few friends, but they are in cities. Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup Looking down for miles Through high still The reason is unclear. Snyder eventually obtains an unsatisfactory explanation from the Department of Agriculture, claiming his “general unsuitability” for the job. It appears Snyder may have been blacklisted – or red-listed – for his union sympathies (his grandfather was an IWW “Wobbly” and Snyder himself joined the far-left Marine Cooks and Stewards Union when he was eighteen). “I am forced to admit that no one thing gives me such unalloyed pleasure as simply being in the mountains,” Snyder wrote to Whalen at the time. “My rucksack and boots hang accusingly on the wall.” Consequently, he ended up working in a logging camp in eastern Oregon that summer and worked on a trail crew in Yosemite during the summer of ’55, after finishing up his graduate studies in East Asian Languages at UC Berkeley. In May 1956, Snyder left for Kyoto aboard a freighter to study Zen Buddhism and climb the Japanese mountains. Once in Japan, where he lived off and on for the next ten years, Snyder met a group of Yamabushi, so-called Mountain Buddhists, who taught him how walking the landscape can be both ritual and meditation. Snyder later told an interviewer for The New Yorker, “They said, ‘O.K., we’re going to see if you are one of us.’ They told me to climb up a five-hundred-foot vertical rock pitch while chanting the Heart Sutra. Luckily, I knew the Heart Sutra, so that was
By noon they had begun to climb toward the gap in the mountains. Riding up through the lavender or soapweed, under the Animas peaks. The shadow of an eagle that had set forth from the line of riders below and they looked up to mark it where it rode in that brittle blue and faultless void. In the evening they came out to upon a mesa that overlooked all the country to the north... The crumpled butcher paper mountains lay in sharp shadowfold under the long blue dusk and in the middle distance the glazed bed of a dry lake lay shimmering like the mare imbrium. (168)
"Everyone is influenced by their childhood. The things I write about and illustrate come from a vast range of inputs, from the earliest impressions of a little child, others from things I saw yesterday and still others from completely out of the blue, though no doubt they owe their arrival to some stimulus, albeit unconscious. I have a great love of wildlife, inherited from my parents, which show through in my subject matter, though always with a view to the humorous—not as a reflective device but as a reflection of my own fairly happy nature.
Without the use of stereotypical behaviours or even language is known universally, the naming of certain places in, but not really known to, Australia in ‘Drifters’ and ‘Reverie of a Swimmer’ convoluted with the overall message of the poems. The story of ‘Drifters’ looks at a family that moves around so much, that they feel as though they don’t belong. By utilising metaphors of planting in a ‘“vegetable-patch”, Dawe is referring to the family making roots, or settling down somewhere, which the audience assumes doesn’t occur, as the “green tomatoes are picked by off the vine”. The idea of feeling secure and settling down can be applied to any country and isn’t a stereotypical Australian behaviour - unless it is, in fact, referring to the continental
Him and his wife drove 4,000 miles to get to a dairy farm by Fair Banks, Alaska. It took them about 10 days to make the trip by car. During their trip they were able to see the Rocky Mountains. While they drove by the Rockies they saw mountain goats. During their few month stay in Alaska, they lived in a log cabin on the dairy farm. Bud was able to hunt moose and bear which he enjoyed.
"Mount Rainier Introduction." National Park Services U.S. Department of Interior. Nps.gov, 27 Dec. 2004. Web. 6 Feb. 2010. .
Born in Home, Pennsylvania in 1927, Abbey worked as a forest ranger and fire look-out for the National Forest Service after graduating from the University of New Mexico. An author of numerous essays and novels, he died in 1989 leaving behind a legacy of popular environmental literature. His credibility as a forest ranger, fire look- out, and graduate of the University of New Mexico lend credibility to his knowledge of America’s wilderness and deserts. Readers develop the sense that Abbey has invested both time and emotion in the vast deserts of America.
From the lone hiker on the Appalachian Trail to the environmental lobby groups in Washington D.C., nature evokes strong feelings in each and every one of us. We often struggle with and are ultimately shaped by our relationship with nature. The relationship we forge with nature reflects our fundamental beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. The works of timeless authors, including Henry David Thoreau and Annie Dillard, are centered around their relationship to nature.
“Your beliefs don’t make you a better person, your behavior does.” This quote comes from a picture found on flickr and makes me think about my younger days as I learned how to be a leader in scouting and it’s similarities to the poem, “A Little Scout Follows Me.” The moral of the poem is that there are always younger eyes watching and learning from those they look up to, even those that don’t realize they are being watched.
The first work of art that I will be examining is Thomas Cole’s View of Mount Holyoke, which is more commonly referred to as The Oxbow. The shortened title is a reference to the shape of the river, which is the central focus of this work. This work is a depiction of the view of Mount Holyoke, which was a tourist attraction, as a thunderstorm retreats into the distance. Cole makes a calculated decision to eliminate a hotel that was located just to the right or the viewer’s perspective and replace it with lush greenery and trees. Cole also makes the decision to physically divide the painting with a diagonal line across the middle, with developed America being represented on one side and undeveloped American being represented on the other. The
According to my perspective of the poem “The Snowman” my ideas are in concordance to David Perkins. The entire poem is a metaphor for having a mind that entertains nothingness. The snowman represents the author as a snowman looking out to its environment and feeling cold and miserable inside just like the winter weather. This snowman is unlike a normal snowman with snowman characteristics because its only use in the poem is to describe the emotions of the author towards the society or environment he is placed in. The poem is written in one long sentence which I think means the continuousness of the misery the author feels inside of him since the sentence is a run on and “continuous”. Since this poem is written in a very broad way it can be
W.E.B. Dubois was one of the most prolific and pioneering leaders during the early Civil Rights era. Throughout his life, he produced numerous works as a commentary on the social construct that existed between whites and blacks, including the groundbreaking collection of essays The Souls of Black Folk published in 1903. These essays detailed the historical, political and sociological plight of African Americans in society after the Civil War. In addition, the essays introduced the concept of double consciousness which referred to the challenge blacks faced in reconciling an African heritage with an American identity, a theory that would disseminate into his later works. Accordingly, his poem “The Song of the Smoke” published in 1907 is an extension of his earlier work in double consciousness, but with an emphasis on the celebration of black heritage. Embedded in these affirmations of blackness; however, is a sense of longing for the unity and equality of all races. In the poem, “The Song of the Smoke”, DuBois reflects on the past, finding grief and courage in the legacy of his slave ancestry and toward the future, hoping a new strength and dignity is formed amongst all Americans.
Nature is often a focal point for many author’s works, whether it is expressed through lyrics, short stories, or poetry. Authors are given a cornucopia of pictures and descriptions of nature’s splendor that they can reproduce through words. It is because of this that more often than not a reader is faced with multiple approaches and descriptions to the way nature is portrayed. Some authors tend to look at nature from a deeper and personal observation as in William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, while other authors tend to focus on a more religious beauty within nature as show in Gerard Manley Hopkins “Pied Beauty”, suggesting to the reader that while to each their own there is always a beauty to be found in nature and nature’s beauty can be uplifting for the human spirit both on a visual and spiritual level.
Swimming through the river, like a red bolt of lightning, the salmon tries to find the place it was born at so it can spawn. It has learned this through the species’ trial and error, which is acquiring knowledge, one of the most important parts of a journey. As we’ve seen through many journeys, such as the poem by CP Cavafy “Ithaka”, and the migrations of animals like salmon, beluga whales, and horseshoe crabs, the journey is the most important thing out of an adventure. Although the destination still matters, the journey is where you gain all of your knowledge and your important items from.
Through the ingenious works of poetry the role of nature has imprinted the 18th and 19th century with a mark of significance. The common terminology ‘nature’ has been reflected by our greatest poets in different meanings and understanding; Alexander Pope believed in reason and moderation, whereas Blake and Wordsworth embraced passion and imagination.
Many poets are inspired by the impressive persona that exists in nature to influence their style of poetry. The awesome power of nature can bring about thought and provoke certain feelings the poet has towards the natural surroundings.