Question

What are two themes Gary Snyder writes about in “Hay for the Horses”?

Answer 1

The first theme was I guess how he was going to find a way to get the hay to the horses.Next once he found the way then they was able to eat. It mustve been hard.

Answer 2

The narrator starts the poem describing the long night of driving that a farmer had in order to deliver the hay. He "pulled in at eight a.m." The narrator then directs the attention to their actions and somebody else's, apparently both farmers:  

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.

Then the speaker continues describing a scene at lunchtime, where, under a Black oak, in the heat of the day, the man who delivers the hay says the meaningful and final sentences of the work:  

“I’m sixty-eight”

“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.”

From this short view of the poem, there are several themes that the reader can take out of the poem. Two of the are the following:

"Life happens too fast, sometimes without even notice" The poem leads you thinking on how time flies, in one second you are seventeen, saying that you would hate delivering hay your whole life, and the next second, you are sixty-eight, finding out that you have spent your whole life doing exactly something you said you would not.

"People do not always get the jobs they want" or similarly, "People do not always make their living out of something they like".

Certainly, the farmer did not want to buck and deliver hay his whole life. However, whatever the circumstances might have been, he ended up at his 60s with a work he did not want to.