Axe Handles by Gary Snyder

First published: 1983, in Axe Handles: Poems

Type of poem: Narrative lyric

The Poem

Gary Snyder’s “Axe Handles,” a thirty-six-line poem, tells a small domestic story that widens into a meditation on parenting, the transmission of cultural heritage, and the relevance of ancient wisdom to ordinary, everyday life. The poet (who speaks the poem), tells about teaching his son Kai, on an April afternoon, how to throw a hatchet so deftly that it will lodge into a stump. Kai remembers having seen a hatchet-head stored in “the shop” and goes to get it. He “wants it for his own.”

The father uses the hatchet they had been throwing to shape an old broken axe handle into a handle for Kai’s rescued hatchet-head. As he works, the speaker suddenly recalls a phrase from his reading of modern American poet Ezra Pound, who did free translations of Chinese literature: “’When making an axe handle/ the pattern is not far off.’” He paraphrases the quotation to his son, relating it to their own task of using a hatchet to make a handle for a hatchet.

The speaker, meditating again, associates the wisdom of the phrase first with Lu Ji, a Chinese poet and essayist who died early in the fourth century c.e., and then with a former teacher of his own who translated Lu Ji’s work. Then the speaker has a revelation that leads him to compare Lu Ji; Pound; his teacher, Shih-hsiang Chen; and himself to axes, simultaneously models and tools in the ongoing handing-down of cultural patterns, particularly poetry, from generation to generation. The speaker predicts that Kai, as yet just a “handle,” is also slated “soon/ To be shaping again” for generations yet unborn. The poem ends with a simple understated phrase expressing the speaker’s awe at the continuity of human culture expressed by people in tools as well as in books: “How we go on.”

Forms and Devices

Snyder is known for the plainness of his diction and the accessibility of his style. “Axe Handles” is written in unrhymed free-verse lines of from three to ten syllables, resulting in a long and narrow shape on the page and a forward propulsion. Words at the beginning of phrases echo one another in randomly placed half rhymes and with alliteration, giving supple shape and musicality to the poem: “show,” “how,” “throw”; “sticks,” “stump,” “shop”; “gets it,” “wants it,” “hatchet,” “cut it,” “take it”; “long,” “length.” These sonic pleasures add to the genial tone of the poem, the sense that the speaker and his son enjoy each other’s company, that the atmosphere is bright and relaxed, and that what one initiates, the other will follow.

The first half of the poem is laced with verbs as two male members of one family work and play during an afternoon in early spring. There is something mimetic of the arch and thudding fall of a flying hatchet in the consonant clusters and rhythm of “One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.” All the lines are phrase-length, ending cleanly without disconcerting enjambments; the verse proceeds with balance and grace, with an almost kind, storytelling tone of voice.

Snyder emphasizes the surprise and serendipity of “the phrase/ First learned from Ezra Pound” occurring to him right on cue by cutting the poem in half with it. He marks it off with quotation marks and indents its second line dramatically from the left-hand margin. He does not say that he remembers, or calls to mind, Pound’s phrase, but instead, he seems to hear it, clear as a clarion: It “Rings in [his] ears!”—a stunning use of the only exclamation mark in the poem. The sudden route that opens up to him between the real and the literary is not an abstraction but a sensuous experience; not a conscious thought but an unbidden spoken sound. So should his reading function in his life, Snyder seems to imply, as coterminous with his work and play with tools, as a seamless part of his afternoons with his growing son, a “natural” bolstering of everything he does.

“Axe Handles” is a poem of many and varied repetitions, loving its own vocabulary for its usefulness in the here and now, and over long, long centuries. In a poem that stresses how much of language and culture is inherited, it is appropriate that Snyder does not strain for synonyms but instead lovingly repeats again and again the same words: the word “hatchet” six times in the first thirteen lines, the word “axe” seven times in the last half of the poem, the word “handle” eight times, weaving through the lines from beginning to end. These words, and the tools they refer to, belong to the Snyders and are used casually by them, but they have been handed down over centuries, burnished by use, and remade according to pattern.

The wisdom first quoted in the poem as derived from Ezra Pound is repeated in the poem twice again, once in his own words, as if the speaker could not relish it enough. What was taught to him by Pound, by Lu, and by Shih-hsiang, he seizes to teach to Kai in this providential moment. He is a disciple of archaic wisdom, a practitioner of it, and a teacher in his own right, using the tools in his hands to demonstrate how “we’ll shape the handle/ by checking the handle/ Of the axe we cut with.” This is a lesson at once in tool-making, in philosophy, and in aesthetics.

It is part of the casual anecdotal feel of the poem that it is held together by “ands,” each development in its small drama introduced by this humble conjunction. Although this is a rudimentary method of plot advancement, the word “and” can be read as profoundly connective, as well as casually so. When Snyder turns, in the middle of the poem, to paraphrase Pound’s phrase to his son, he begins with an “And” that teaches the reader the connection between the two halves of the poem, between action and contemplation, between the past and the present, between the external order of things and the imaginative order of things, between parenting and poetry.

Also, the word “and” is followed twice by epiphany, by an expansion of the horizon of understanding. In line 22 the poet says, “And he sees” and in line 31, “And I see.” That Kai “sees” so swiftly the elegance and comedy of using a tool to make a tool of the same kind justifies the speaker’s understated pride in him.

Snyder himself takes the second epiphany, expressed in terms of metaphor, casting himself simultaneously as late learner and mature teacher among teachers: “And I see: Pound was an axe,/ Chen was an axe, I am an axe/ And my son a handle.” Part of what Snyder “sees” here is that he has earned his space among the masters, those who actively craft the culture, by receiving it, using it, and passing it on. It is typical of Snyder that he should announce this profound connection with mingled confidence and humility, in language without a hint of grandiosity: “How we go on.” Without ado, the “we” of that phrase acknowledges a familial lineage of makers from the fourth century c.e. to the present, from Lu Ji to Kai, and beyond.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXX, October 15, 1983, p. 324.

Nation. CCXXXVII, November 19, 1983, pp. 501.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXIV, September 16, 1983, p. 123.