Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Gary Snyder’s "Cartagena" captures a moment of youthful abandon and raw confrontation with the world’s stark realities. Written in Snyder’s characteristic stripped-down style, the poem juxtaposes exuberance and recklessness against a backdrop of colonial history, economic disparity, and personal disillusionment. The poem is both an adventure narrative and a meditation on guilt, longing, and fleeting experience, evoking a sense of moral unease within the pleasures of physicality and intoxication.

The poem begins with a violent sensory image: "Rain and thunder beat down and flooded the streets." This immediate immersion into the stormy atmosphere sets the tone for the wild, unrestrained experience that follows. The setting, Cartagena, is a historic Colombian port city, infamous for its past as a center of the transatlantic slave trade and colonial exploitation. The storm here functions not just as weather but as a symbolic force—an externalization of chaos, desire, and destruction, mirroring the poet’s inner turbulence.

The scene unfolds in a bar where the speaker and his companions "danced with Indian girls", their revelry made surreal by "water half-way to our knees." The rising floodwater suggests both liberation and entrapment, as if the celebratory moment is already sinking into something uncontrollable. The bar itself, filled with sailors and local women, is a microcosm of global commerce and exploitation—ships docking in foreign lands, transient encounters, and economic exchange masked as intimacy.

Snyder’s detailing of a young woman slipping "down her dress and danced / bare to the waist" introduces an erotic charge but also an implicit power dynamic. The image of a "big negro deckhand" with "his girl on his lap / in a chair her dress over her eyes" suggests a moment of raw physicality, but it is also an ambiguous one—are these interactions rooted in genuine desire, or are they transactional? The "Coca-cola and rum, and rainwater all over the floor" symbolize a blending of global capitalism, intoxication, and nature’s indifference. Coca-Cola, an emblem of American imperialism, appears alongside rum, a product of colonial sugar economies. The floor, covered in rainwater, becomes both a dance floor and a flooded ruin—an emblem of dissolution.

Drunkenness takes hold as the poet "reeled through the rooms," a moment of sensory overload and unfiltered emotion. The sudden exclamation—"Cartagena! swamp of unholy loves!"—reads like an epiphany, an outburst of realization that shatters the momentary thrill of indulgence. Snyder’s choice of "swamp" suggests both the literal, humid geography of the Caribbean and the moral murkiness of the scene. The phrase "unholy loves" invokes a biblical weight, implying a recognition of sin, complicity, or at least moral discomfort with the night’s events.

The emotional climax of the poem comes in the confession:
"And wept for the Indian whores who were younger than me, / and I was eighteen."

This sudden inversion—where the speaker, still barely an adult, recognizes his own youth in comparison to the women whose lives are shaped by systemic inequalities—introduces a moment of self-awareness. Snyder does not position himself as superior or exempt; rather, his realization is one of powerlessness, of seeing the world’s injustices but being caught within them. The use of "whores" is harsh, reflecting both the transactional nature of their lives and perhaps the crude, unfiltered language of his younger self.

The transition to departure is abrupt: "And splashed after the crew down the streets wearing / sandals bought at a stall." The image of running through flooded streets in newly purchased sandals underscores the transient, superficial nature of the encounter—everything is immediate, impermanent, already fading. The poem closes with a classic departure scene: "And got back to the ship, dawn came, / we were far out at sea."

This final line encapsulates the dislocation and inevitability of travel—experiences come in waves, intense and overwhelming, only to be left behind as the ship moves forward. The sea, vast and indifferent, erases the night’s memories, leaving only the poet’s lingering sense of guilt and wonder.

"Cartagena" is ultimately a poem of contradictions—pleasure and regret, youth and awareness, engagement and distance. Snyder captures the moment with a raw, unembellished style that resists romanticizing or moralizing, instead allowing the weight of the experience to speak for itself. The poem does not seek resolution but instead preserves the emotional complexity of the moment—a realization of one’s own youth amid a world shaped by forces much older and more powerful than any single night’s revelry.

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