Stephen Fellows- The Way West Underground

In the poem The Way West Underground Gary Snyder is talking about traveling from East to West and the loss of nature that seems to accompany it. This has been a common theme for a while the idea that the Western world is civilized and nature is conquered. But the most interesting part of the poem for me is towards then end when He talks about the “elder goddess reborn-will race the streets of France and Spain with automatic guns”. It seems less like nature is completely gone but changed and evolved with the growth of “civilization”. He says that the cave paintings are the underground nature. I felt that this was an intriguing idea since these cave paintings could be considered the beginning of civilization and the end of nature in the West. But at the same time they are the closest people can come to nature in Europe.