"The Gentle Snorer" (6)

The Gentle Snorer

When summer came, we locked up our lives and fled to the woods in Maine, and pulled up over our heads a comforter filled with batts of piney dark, tied with crickets' chirretings and the bork of frogs; we hid in a sleep of strangeness from the human humdrum. A pleasant noise the unordered world makes wove around us. Burrowed, we heard the scud of waves, wrack of bending branch, or plop of a fish on his heavy home; the little beasts rummaged the brush. We dimmed to silence, slipped from the angry pull of wishes and will. And then we had a three-week cabin guest who snored; he broke the wilderness of our rest. As all night long he sipped the succulent air, that rhythm we shared made visible to the ear a rich refreshment of the blood. We fed in unison with him. A sound we dreamed and woke to, over the snuff of wind, not loud enough to scare off the roof the early morning chipmunks. Under our skins we heard, as after disease, the bright, thin tick of our time. Sleeping, he mentioned death and celebrated breath. He went back home. The water flapped the shore. A thousand bugs drilled at the darkness. Over the lake a loon howled. Nothing spoke up for us, salvagers always of what we have always lost; and we thought what the night needed was more of man, he left us so partisan.

This poem discusses how the speaker and someone else escape society, only to be reconnected with it in the form of snoring. Van Duyn uses a comforter as a symbol for their wilderness escape: "and pulled up over our heads /a comforter filled with batts of piney dark/tied with crickets' chirretings and the bork /of frogs..." The sounds of nature envelop them in isolation. It removes them from the stress of everyday life, as they are "slipped from the angry pull/of wishes and will." However, when a cabin guest comes for 3 weeks, his snoring brings the two people back to reality. It was just a gentle rhythm that soothed them and reminded them of man's presence on earth. My interpretation is that the speaker wishes humanity would be more in unison with nature, and not have to be so different from one another.