Analysis Of Hay For The Horses By Gary Snyder

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“Hay for the Horses,” by Gary Snyder I chose this poem because it was easy to understand and enjoyable. One other reason why I chose this because my father was once a farmer and this poem is about the hardships that almost every farmers face. The author writes a little bit about himself in the poem which makes it very interesting to read and understand. The second poem I chose to compare was “Guilty at the Rapture,” by Keith Taylor. I chose this poem because it was easy to understand, it was religious, and because it was very different from “Hay for the Horses”. Both author’s main character in the poems are very similar, which is another reason why I choose these two poems.
“Hay for the Horses” is about a farmer delivering hay for the horses. Gary Snyder starts out by describing the farmer’s dangerous ride through the mountains and how itchy they are from the hay dust in the sweaty shirt and shoes. During lunch time the farmer sits under black oak with the same lunch. There, while he eats his lunch, he says he is sixty-eight and he had first bucked hay when he was seventeen. And the day he started, he said, “I would hate to do this for rest of his life,” yet he has gone and done it. This represents many people today, because many people don’t follow what …show more content…

They both talk about a person regretting something that he had done in the past, which represents many people in the United States today. The main character in “Guilty at the Rapture” is very lonely, just like the sixty-eight year old farmer that Snyder talks about in “hay for the Horses.” Both characters are living with the regret rather than trying to fix it and I know this because in the poem “Hay for the Horses” the farmer is sixty-eight and he still is doing what he hates. Similarly in “Guilty at the Rapture”, the main character smokes and then tries to cover it up with mint even though he knows smoking is

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