Life does not always turn out the way a person expects and most often times than not, one has to live with the choices that they made in life as every choice has its consequence. The poet in the Hays for Horses poem is a 68-year old who reflects about life and their career and they clearly state that they never thought that they would be doing the same thing that they had started when they were at a ripe age of seventeen years (Hettich, 45). It comes at a time that they cannot go back to their younger ears and make different choices in life. At that ripe old age, most people have the chance to reflect on what course their life took.
The work is tiring and time consuming as from the introduction, the poet indicates that they were travelling during the night to transport the hay to its destination. It is unsafe at night but the worker delivering the hay does it despite the fact that they are older and therefore their level of speed reduced due to aging and fatigue (McCrae 38). Though it is not what they expected to be doing at their age, the worker gladly does their work and it is, as they had no option throughout life in that they had to be in the same kind of job for more than fifty years.
From his reflection, he expected to hate the job from the first day that he started stacking the hay for the horses. He however agrees that despite their feelings in the past, they have had to do the job repeatedly. In a reflection part of the statements that the old operate states, he is in a sense of remembering what he has probably gone through in his line of career. They are thinking about their career journey through another level in that, what they expected to detest has become their main source of livelihood and passion that they pursue despite the odd hours involved in delivering the hay at the required time (Snyder 29).
Life, in the eyes of many people remains a mystery, as it is hard to draw a line through the feelings and sense of accomplishment that they feel whenever they are in their workplaces. From a young age, people have big dreams and expectations about life, which becomes an issue they want to pursue (Dooley 64). Some lucky few people in such accomplish their dreams and are in line to the correct from they want their life while the others feel a level of dissatisfaction. Others have regrets as to what they would have done in their prime and active years at an old age. They feel they should have taken more risks or done things in a different way to better their lives.
It is worth noting that not all people feel accomplished with how life turned out. Others have some level of discontentment with the jobs they work on and are there because there are no other options and as most people say, they are there for the monetary value that they get from such engagements. The only way to prevent such occurrences is through taking risks when young and explore the different things in life to enable one enjoy life while being careful not to make mistakes that they will live with for the rest of their lives.
Works Cited
Dooley, Patrick K. "Biocentric, Homocentric, and Theocentric Environmentalism." Willa Cather's Ecological Imagination 5 (2003): 64.
Hettich, Michael. "Earth Literacy Literature American Literature and Earth Literacy Selections for Environmental Awareness."(2006): 45
McCrae, John. In Flanders Fields and Other Poems. Dundurn, (2015): 38-40.
Snyder, Gary. The Gary Snyder reader: prose, poetry, and translations, 1952-1998. Counterpoint Press, (2000): 29-38.
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