"Rip Rap"

- Gary Snyder  

         

                 In his poem ‘Riprap’ Gary Snyder creates existential meaning through the use of nature image. He uses imagery to express how everything is connected in nature in a poetic way. He finds comfort solidity in nature and he find it in a construction of a path through it. He expresses he would not appreciate the existing of nature modifying human agent because nature is the source of existential security.

                 In ‘Riprap’ he connects his poem to the universe, to the mind, and see all things as connected: rock, body, mind, space, time /”in choice of place, set/ Before the body of the mind/ in space and time”/. These lines are about how we just cannot do everything. Sometimes we have go with the nature’s flow. We cannot force nature; nature forces us instead. / “lost ponies with dragging saddles”/. Snyder points out it is important to understand that loss is necessity in the natural world and part of the changefulness of being in time. / “The world is like an endless; four-dimensional; Game of go”/. These lines expresses that the world is huge and endless which keeps going continuously.

                 Patrick Murphy comments on this poem, the act of riprapping a mountain trail laying down loose rocks wedged together to form a hard trail bed depicts the process of building a poem, living a life and participating in a universe,” demonstrating how the mental and physical are both part of the universe flow of nature. “Riprap” demonstrates the minds power to move from one solid place to another both creating and exploring a field of awareness for itself.