Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Gary Snyder’s "Old Woodrat’s Stinky House" is a layered meditation on time, ecological continuity, and the interwoven lives of animals, humans, and cosmic forces. The poem blends myth, natural history, and human cultural memory into a vision that spans billions of years, reducing human history to a moment within the vast cycles of planetary change. Using the woodrat’s midden as a symbol of accumulation—of organic material, knowledge, and survival—the poem reflects on what it means to leave traces, to persist, and to inhabit the earth within nature’s greater rhythms.

The poem opens with a cosmic image: "The whole universe is an ocean of dazzling light / On it dance the waves of life and death." This grand, luminous beginning sets the poem in a broad, almost Buddhist framework, where existence is fluid, shifting between being and non-being. The reference to "a service for the spirits of the dead" suggests that what follows is not just an observation of nature but also a kind of ritual or remembrance, placing human mortality in the context of far greater cycles.

Snyder moves from cosmic imagery into myth, invoking Coyote and Earthmaker, figures from Native American cosmology. Their act of creation—stretching a meadowlark nest across the waters to form the earth—is a striking alternative to the Biblical creation myth, emphasizing improvisation, adaptation, and the interconnectedness of all life. This image of floating, fragile origins reinforces the theme of impermanence and the idea that life emerges from chance, from small and contingent beginnings rather than divine decree.

The poem then launches into an expansive survey of time scales, layering geologic, astronomical, biological, and human histories together. "Three hundred something million years the solar system swings around with all the Milky Way—" collapses unimaginably vast movements of celestial bodies into a single sweeping statement. The cycles of ice ages, occurring every "one hundred fifty million years apart", contrast with the lifespan of human civilizations, which are dwarfed in comparison. Snyder continuously scales downward: from the planetary to the earthly, from cosmic rotations to climate patterns, down to the temporary constructions of living creatures.

The woodrat's nest becomes a focal point, a structure built over "eight thousand years," making it one of the longest continuously used homes in North America. Snyder parallels this with "four thousand years of using writing," suggesting that literacy itself is barely half as old as this simple, enduring shelter. He further scales down time: "A spoken language works for about five centuries, lifespan of a Douglas fir." Here, language—often seen as humanity’s most defining achievement—is compared to the life cycle of a single tree, reinforcing how fleeting human constructs are within ecological time.

The next passage moves into the cycles of life and time familiar to human experience: floods, fires, lifespans, seasons, lunar cycles, and even the briefest measure—"a breath is a breath." By placing a single exhalation on the same scale as the grand cosmic movements described earlier, Snyder affirms that all these patterns—whether spanning eons or mere moments—are equally part of the rhythm of existence.

The second half of the poem moves into a catalog of what Coyote has eaten, listing the remains found in "5,086 coyote scats." The list—containing small mammals, birds, fish, insects, and even human-made trash—becomes a testament to the interconnectedness of all things. The inclusion of objects like "paper, rag, twine, orange peel, matches, rubber, tinfoil, shoestring, paint rag, two pieces of a shirt—" blurs the boundary between nature and culture, showing that human existence leaves traces even within wild creatures' lives.

Snyder extends this vision into human history, specifically the "Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem" and the Great Basin, where humans have been "eating cattail pollen, bullrush seeds, raw baby birds, cooked ducks and geese, antelope, squirrel, beetles, chub, and suckers—ten thousand years of living." Just as woodrats build their nests over thousands of years, human history is also layered in ancient remains, stored in places like Lovelock Cave, where "thousands of paleo human droppings" mix with artifacts of survival. The image of "great tall woodrat heaps," built from "shale flakes, beads, sheep scats, flaked points, thorns, piled up for centuries," suggests that both humans and animals engage in acts of accumulation, leaving behind records of their existence.

The poem then turns to a moment of direct speech, with "Cottontail boy" expressing disgust at the woodrat’s midden: "Woodrat makes me puke! Shitting on his grandmother’s blankets— / stinking everything up—pissing on everything— / yucky old woodrat! Makes his whole house stink!" The child's reaction is visceral, rejecting the mess and disorder of the accumulated past. But this is immediately countered by Coyote, who represents the wisdom of adaptability: "You people should stay put here, learn your place, do good things. Me, I’m traveling on." Coyote, ever the trickster and wanderer, refuses to be tied down, preferring movement to settlement. This contrast between permanence (the woodrat’s midden) and transience (Coyote’s journey) forms the poem’s final philosophical tension: do we root ourselves in tradition, building upon what has come before, or do we follow Coyote’s path and keep moving, adapting to the unknown?

Snyder’s "Old Woodrat’s Stinky House" is a meditation on scale, survival, and the different ways beings—both human and non-human—inhabit the earth. The poem collapses time, placing cosmic cycles alongside breaths, making an eight-thousand-year-old rat’s nest as significant as the written word. By weaving together creation myths, ecological observations, and scatological records, Snyder presents a vision in which all life—coyotes, humans, woodrats, bristlecone pines—exists within the same fundamental cycles of decay and renewal. Whether we stay rooted or move on, the earth continues its rhythms, accumulating history one layer at a time.

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