Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Gary Snyder’s "Cross-Legg’d" is a quiet, intimate poem that distills love, presence, and cyclical continuity into a single moment. The poem is sparse, yet rich with implied depth, evoking the lived-in simplicity of shared experience, where love, creativity, and nature become inseparable. Snyder’s signature approach—melding Buddhist thought, ecological awareness, and everyday physicality—manifests here in a meditation on the recurrence of love and life, framed within the small yet infinite space of a tent.

The opening lines set the scene with sensory precision: "Cross-legg’d under the low tent roof, dim light, dinner done, drinking tea." The compact phrasing and rhythmic alliteration reinforce the stillness of the moment, its gentle, unassuming ease. The setting is elemental—shelter, food, warmth, companionship—evoking both monastic simplicity and the rusticity of wilderness life. The tent, a temporary dwelling, suggests both transience and intimacy; it is not a structure of permanence, yet within it exists a complete world.

Snyder then turns to the body: "We live in dry old west / lift shirts bare skin lean touch lips—old touches." The language is compressed, as if capturing a series of fleeting impressions rather than constructing a full narrative. The "dry old west" suggests both landscape and a kind of elemental aridity—stripped-down, essential, unembellished. The mention of "old touches" deepens the sense of time, implying a long history of physical connection that remains vital, undiminished. Love here is not about novelty but about recurrence, about returning to the same gestures with renewed presence.

The poem then expands outward, connecting personal love with the larger cycles of creation: "Love made, poems, makyngs, always new, same stuff life after life, as though Milarepa four times built a tower of stone like each time was the first." The reference to Milarepa, the Tibetan yogi and poet who was repeatedly commanded by his teacher to build and then dismantle towers of stone, becomes a metaphor for both artistic creation and romantic devotion. Love, like poetry, is a practice—something constantly rebuilt, reshaped, rediscovered. It is not about originality but about the depth of engagement, the willingness to start anew each time as though it were the first. Snyder ties this directly to his own craft, equating "makyngs"—a reference to the medieval idea of poetry as "making"—with the continuous process of love and creation.

Nature remains ever-present in the framework of this love: "Our love is mixed with rocks and streams, a heartbeat, a breath, a gaze makes place in the dizzy eddy." The physicality of earth and water underscores the organic, non-possessive nature of the connection. The phrase "a gaze makes place" suggests that perception itself—seeing, recognizing, acknowledging—creates meaning, even within the ceaseless movement of life ("dizzy eddy"). Love, like water, does not hold still; it swirls, shifts, adapts.

The closing lines return to the present moment, to the immediacy of being: "Living this old clear way— / a sizzle of ash and embers." The image of embers suggests warmth, transience, and quiet endurance. Fire is an ancient symbol of transformation, and here, it signifies both the persistence of love and the inevitability of its passing, only to be rekindled again. The final images reinforce the tent as a space of elemental presence: "Scratchy breeze on the tent fly / one sip tea, hunch on bones, we two be here / what comes." The "scratchy breeze" against the thin fabric mirrors the fragility of existence, yet the act of "one sip tea" is an acceptance of the moment, a small but complete gesture of mindfulness. The final phrase, "we two be here what comes," encapsulates the poem’s ethos—openness to time, to cycles, to whatever life brings.

"Cross-Legg’d" is a poem of quiet devotion, emphasizing the ways in which love, like poetry, is both cyclical and ever-renewing. Snyder’s use of Buddhist imagery, natural elements, and everyday physicality transforms this small scene into a meditation on the nature of presence itself. The tent, the fire, the breeze, the tea—all of these are temporary, yet within them exists the eternal rhythm of returning, of making again, of love as a lived, breathing process.

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