Blood and Water in "Night Herons": Gary Snyder’s Hidden Exodus Narrative

October 11, 2019

In ‘Night Herons,’ Gary Snyder criticizes the notion that nature exists to serve human needs through indirect allusions to the biblical narrative of Exodus. The result is an allegory in which San Francisco takes on the role of Ancient Egypt, abusing the city’s water supply as the biblical Pharaoh enslaved the Hebrew people. This essay will demonstrate the poem’s characterisation of the Bay area as a place of industry and captivity; it’s association of water with blood as to recall the first plague visited upon Egypt; and it’s use of this complex intertextuality to align God with both nature and Snyder himself as a way of forecasting future change.

Snyder first constructs San Francisco as an Egypt for the modern age by describing it almost exclusively in terms of captivity, pollution, and industry. He opens the poem by mentioning “stationary boilers” (Snyder 3) a “high smoke stack / at the edge of the water” (4-5), and a “steam turbine … to drive salt water into the city” (6-8). These are all images of nature being disrupted and acted upon by machines of industry. Water is polluted, boiled, driven from the ocean, seen purely in terms of its utility to civilization. This is consistent with Snyder’s environmental ideology when it comes to water treatment, yet also a reflection of the Egyptian treatment of the Hebrew people. They are taken “with hard bondage” (Exodus 1:14) in the same way water is driven from the ocean and kept in boilers and turbines; they are “made … to serve with rigour” (1:13), made not only in sense of being forced, but of being made, existing for no other purpose but to serve the needs of their masters. This reflects the common sentiment that Snyder, through his work, opposes: the idea that any water given back to nature and not used by humans is wasteful. This language of utility continues with Snyder’s description of a possible San Francisco earthquake, a rapturous image (given the context) in which “water / to fight fire, runs / loose on the streets” (Snyder 12-14). Water is used to serve a purpose, and once its duties have been satisfied it is left “with no pressure” (15), no burden, but in this the truth of its dislocation becomes clear: it is also without pressure in the sense of being without current or flow, without the literal water-pressure of the ocean. It is, like the Hebrews, displaced and imprisoned in a foreign land. This is why Snyder associates San Francisco not only with industry, but captivity. There is a “wire gate” (16), a physical border which can only be passed with great difficulty by “squirm[ing] up” through the gap (20); and there is a “rotten rusty island prison” (22) presumably Alcatraz, a famous image of captivity above water—a prison to reign over Snyder’s imprisoned. The effect of all this is to show San Francisco not as a positive symbol of Western enterprise and freedom, but the opposite: a land of exploitation and sin.

Snyder further crystallises his allegory by aligning the water of the poem not only with the captive Hebrews, but directly with the water of Egypt—turned by God into blood—and in doing so further characterises San Francisco as a place of sin. This is first introduced though a metaphor of Snyder’s own making, as the turbine driving water from the ocean is also said to be a “pump” (6), pumping water “into the city’s veins / mains” (8-9), through its “tubes and lanes” (49). This evokes the movement of a heart pumping blood through the veins of the body, thus making the water of San Francisco the literal sustaining lifeblood of the city, passing through the boilers and “glorious cleansing / treatment / plants” as blood is filtered through the liver and kidneys (51-53). This is at once another statement on the utility of the poem’s captive water, positioning it as part of a larger system upon which we all rely, and should therefore be better stewards of, but also implies sin and judgement, as it is a clear extension of the poem’s allegory. In Exodus, God has Aaron raise his hand against the Egyptian circulatory system, “their streams … rivers … ponds … pools of water … that there may be blood all throughout the land of Egypt” (Exodus 7:19). Snyder creates metaphorically what God, in the Old Testament, makes real. In the biblical context, it is a statement symbolic of the sins Egyptians committed against the Hebrews, recollecting the time they cast Hebrew babies into the Nile, mixing water with blood (1:22). By invoking it, Snyder casts similar judgement on the current state of things, as the loose water mentioned previously, in light of this intertextuality, becomes blood literally “run[ning] / loose on the streets” (Snyder 13-14). In Snyder’s view, San Francisco has already spilled blood in the same manner as the ancient Egyptians and are courting fate in the same way. This is projected again when Snyder’s narrator notes “frozen bait” (28) as he walks along the water, possibly evoking a tradition of bait-fishing that has become stalled, impossible, driving the night herons away through lack of food, just as in Egypt “the fish that was in the river died; and the river stank, and the Egyptians could not drink of the water of the river,” an image that has become all too real in the pollution of the modern era (Exodus 7:18). By comparing water to blood, the poem conveys both the importance of water and warns of the consequences of misusing it, forecasting changes in the environment which will truly make man-made water systems, as Snyder describes, into “sewers of … judgement” (Snyder 50).

However, as the Exodus narrative is, in the end, about deliverance, so too does Snyder offer an image of hope in the titular night herons. Just as the Hebrews question whether their God will return, whether He has seen their captivity, so too does the narrator question: “How could the / night herons ever come back? / to this noisy place on the bay” (41-43). This, the driving question of the entire poem, is yet another affirmation of San Francisco’s pollution and sin; yet it also suggests that the night herons eventual return would come about due to—or even bring about—a restoration of the environment. This positions them collectively as remote figures, high in the sky, able to bestow blessings upon the world. In other words, they are the collective God of the poem. When they circle the prison, Snyder naturally describes it as being “surrounded by lights,” alluding to the idea of light shining from the darkness—the night herons (23). The poem even goes so far as to explicitly call them “fluttering god-like birds” (24); while they are plural, they operate as a whole, in the likeness of a singular God made flesh on earth. “Truth / has never forgot” them because, in this framework, they are the way, the truth, and the life (25-26). Within the Exodus narrative specifically, their circling of the prison implies an acknowledgement of captivity, that God has seen the oppression of the waters and has come down to bring deliverance. And this is why, in their very first mention in the very first line of the poem, they are said to “nest in the cypress / by the … boilers” (1-3). They first make themselves known to the reader through a boiling bush, the same way God first made himself known to Moses. The poem itself is the deliverance.

On a metatextual level, the sum total of all this is to cast Snyder into the role of Moses himself, as it is through his poem that the problem of water framed as utility, without regard for environmental stewardship, is brought to light. As a writer, he accomplishes this through language, using words to create worlds. Like Moses, he is bestowed with the power of God in that he, in an abstract sense, possesses the Word: “the Word [that] was with God, and the Word [that] was God” at the beginning of creation (John 1:1). In writing ‘Night Herons,’ Turtle Island, and ‘Four Changes,’ he breathes life onto the page. Just as Moses used God’s power to bring about change, so too does Snyder, in writing inherently political works of environmental literature, seek to spread awareness and eventual change. ‘Night Herons’ specifically ends with an image of movement on the edge of the city, looking into nature in the same way Moses and the Hebrews left Egypt to venture into the “wilderness” (Exodus 7:16), bringing about a change in their fortunes through Moses’ spreading of the Red Sea, just as the poem ends with Snyder’s heralding of a “spreading changing sky,” a new dawn (57).

Ultimately, through the use of complex intertextuality and allegory, blood and water, Gary Snyder is able to make his poem more than it might ever have been on its own. He uses the most enduring narrative of enslavement—a foundational myth of Western, Christian, American culture—to indict that same culture for their treatment of waters, and show how they have become the villains of their own story.

Works Cited

Carroll, Robert P., and Stephen Prickett. The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha. Oxford University Press, 2008.

Snyder, Gary. “Night Herons.” Turtle Island, New Directions, 1969, p. 35.