Nancy's powerpoint included Gary Snyder's poem "Hay for the Horses" as
an illustration of prepositional phrases and their descriptive power.  The
poem certainly is a stunning example of that.  I also found myself thinking,
though, about whether and how grammar (knowing the basic sentence
constituents) could contribute to a classroom discussion of the poem.  My
American Lit. students in a web course read it and like it, but I haven't
taught it in detail.

He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay behind the barn.
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.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
--The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshopper crackling in the weeds--
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"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."

      Students often see the man's words at the end as quite bitter and
regretful ones.  I encourage them to imagine the tone and mood of those
words as clearly as they can, considering the rest of the poem.  What is the
man's day like?  What is the work like?  What impressions do we get of the
life?
       If I were conducting a leisurely class discussion, I might ask
students to look at the sentences that make up the poem.  Ideally, students
might point out that the first two, long, descriptive ones are mostly
prepositional phrases, and that the last ones stated by the man have no
prepositional phrases but are full of clauses.  I would hope a student would
notice the pronouns starting the sentence groups: He, We, and I, and the
subjects of two verbals, the old mare and grasshoppers.  I might ask a
question such as How do people (or living beings) fit into their environment
and their work here?  Are we mostly aware of the individual, or the setting
of the individual?   I would encourage them to notice that in the opening
sentences the people (man and narrator), anonymous in the pronouns, are
embedded in the environment and the working just goes by, in the locations
of the prepositions, without comment or reflection.  At the end, the man's
consciousness becomes vocal; he remembers, reflects, reacts, without
prepositions but with verbs.
       I think that maybe, after this kind of look, students might sense
that althought the man may indeed have regrets, his words also express the
awareness that (to put it colloquially) life happens, that it is what we do
and it has a momentum of its own and that that's neither a good nor a bad
thing.
       I don't want to overstate the role of basic grammar knowledge for
getting into a poem such as this, but I think the ability to look at the
sentences in a poem, name the basic kinds of parts, see patterns and the
contrasts, and connect the structures with the moods in a general way, is
helpful.  It seems to me it doesn't take a specialized or detailed knowledge
of grammar for this to happen, but it does take a confidence in and comfort
level with the basics.

Brock

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