If this was my poetry final, I would...

OBSERVATIONS -Beginning has a lot of diction that implies beauty talking about the trees and snow (gleam, slender)
But...
-Snow and hemlock (both have death connected with them)
-Beauty and Death are mentioned close together
-Then goes into (the living) the nuthatch
-Area is described as sparse (little, single, clear)
-Mentions the plants a lot
-bug is personified
-Formal serious, but ends with an informal splash (mimesis- actions sounds like, slither, splash, sneeze)
-Contrast of time
-Aliteration
-structure is weird
-no verbs in the first half
-Adjective noun first part
-First part about the setting
-Second part about the bug
-Focused on the small details (the tiny bug, the needles,the little hemlock)
-Contradictions
---Biggest little lake
---DOWN from the treetrunks UP through time
-The bug is bare like the nature around him
-The only sound is the Nuthatch call before the "Splash"
---few disturbances
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INTERPRETATIONS
-The snow only allows for death (Snow + Hemlock)
-Hemlock is just coming out (Hemlock half in shade)
-Or maybe hidden
-nothing really hangs around during the winter, only the nuthatch, the bug and death
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Comment on Commentary
(Gary Snyder’s Old Pond and commentary by Camille Puglia)
-Beauty to impluse (mountains and snow to dive)
-scrabling is happy
-authors experience
-nature is reduced to it simplest form
-first 2 lines and the second two are free standing haikus
-hemlock=human (i found this reallu interesting because of hemlocks poison, is she talking about how humans kill things?) and the duality of man
-hemlock=frail human figure