HAY FOR THE HORSES by Gary Snyder

In the poem, "Hay For The Horses," by Gary Snyder, we are introduced to the speaker. The speaker is with another person who is a farmer. Both people are coming back from a long night of driving to go get hay for the farm. Once they get back to the farm at 8 am, the poem starts to describe the environment on the farm.Before 8 am you already get the sense of hard work put in overnight to go get this hay for the farm and before midday you also see more of the hard work that is put in on the farm in the lines that say,"With winch and ropes and hooks We stacked the bales up clean To splintery redwood rafters High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa Whirling through shingle-cracks of light, Itch of haydust in the sweaty shirt and shoes."

By lunchtime, the audience is seeing the horses eating from their pale buckets and are made aware of the crickets crackling through the weeds. We get a sense of the small, day to day things that happen on the farm.

"I'm sixty-eight" he said, "I first bucked hay when I was seventeen. I thought, that day I started, I sure would hate to do this all my life. And dammit, that's just what I've gone and done."
I feel like the poet goes from the simple day to day things to hearing the farmer say that he's sixty eight and never thought he'd be doing the same line of work that he hated so much since he was seventeen. I feel like form the beginning of the poem, the poet makes you aware of the sense of time and how it goes by so quickly. One minute you're seventeen hating this job and the next thing you know, through all the hard work and sweat put in, minute to minute, day to day, you spent your whole life working hard doing something you've hated and you're already sixty eight. That's Fifty one years spent working a job you've hated your whole life, more than a quarter or more than half of your life. It's kind of like the farmer has an epiphany in a way at the end when he says,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen. I thought, that day I started, I sure would hate to do this all my life. And dammit, that's just what I've gone and done."
Having this moment of clarity,like yes I did hate this all my life, it's like he gets mad at himself for doing it but then just as quickly as he gets mad, he just embraces it and takes it for what it is. It doesn't seem like this is a good thing and it doesn't seem like this is a bad thing. The farmer just embraces the hard work he has done day to day, until this point.

I guess a lot of people can relate to this poem, in the sense that a lot of people don't want to get stuck working the rest of their lives doing something they hate. Lots of people give up on their dreams, to become grownups with responsibilities who work 9-5 jobs that they dread just to fit into society. In college, there is always pressure to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life or what career you will end up studying for. Being young,many people are confused about what they should study for their career paths because of lack of experience. This poem also reminds me of something my father always told me which is when you pick out what you want to do for the rest of your life , to make sure it's something you love because you will never work a day in your life. You will never strain yourself emotionally or physically because it's something that will make you happy to do and bring that great energy into your life and allow you to keep exerting it. Many young people with the confusion of not knowing what to do end up picking the wrong things and end up going into careers they end up hating and get stuck doing them for sometimes the rest of their lives.