Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Gary Snyder’s "For a Far-Out Friend" is a deeply personal poem that weaves together themes of memory, remorse, love, and transformation. It is an address to a friend from the past—one with whom the speaker shared moments of violence, intoxication, and passion—before losing touch and rediscovering them in an unexpected way. The poem moves fluidly through time, shifting from raw recollection to idealized vision, from the immediate to the mythic. Snyder’s signature style—naturalistic imagery, Buddhist-inflected insight, and a reverence for the body as part of a greater cosmic dance—infuses the poem with layers of meaning.

The poem opens with a confession: “Because I once beat you up / Drunk, stung with weeks of torment / And saw you no more.” The starkness of this admission sets the tone—this is a poem about regret. The speaker acknowledges his past violence, attributing it to his own suffering, but does not attempt to justify it. The brief and matter-of-fact “And saw you no more” underscores the finality of that moment, as if the act of violence itself created an irreparable rift. Yet the friend, now reappeared, offers “calm talk”, revealing a capacity for forgiveness that surprises the speaker and prompts self-reflection: “I now suppose / I was less sane than you.” This admission of imbalance—of being “hooked on books” while the friend “hung on dago red” (cheap wine)—suggests an implicit contrast between intellectual pursuit and a rawer, more instinctual experience of life. The speaker had thought himself superior, but now he reassesses.

The poem then shifts into memory, recalling an intoxicating moment of youthful vitality: “You once ran naked toward me / Knee deep in cold March surf.” This scene, set on a “tricky beach between two / pounding seastacks”, is elemental—wind, water, and rock framing a moment of unguarded freedom. The phrase “tricky beach” suggests both an actual physical challenge and a metaphorical instability, as if the past itself is shifting beneath the speaker’s feet.

The description of the friend transforms into something almost divine: “I saw you as a Hindu Deva-girl.” The speaker’s vision elevates the friend from mere human form to that of a celestial dancer, a supernatural being. The imagery of “light legs dancing in the waves” and “breasts like dream-breasts / Of sea, and child, and astral / Venus-spurting milk” is rapturous, mingling eroticism, nature, and mythology. The “dream-breasts” are a convergence of different associations: maternal, sexual, and cosmic, tying the friend’s body to larger forces—ocean, birth, and celestial femininity.

This moment of idealized beauty culminates in “traded our salt lips”, a simple yet powerful line that grounds the vision in sensuality. Salt—an essential element of the sea, of sweat, of preservation—becomes a symbol of shared intimacy. But the memory does not remain purely physical; it has an almost mystical hold on the speaker. The line “Visions of your body / Kept me high for weeks” suggests a lingering transcendence, as if the encounter left an imprint on his consciousness. He even experiences “a sort of trance” in an unexpected place: “A day in a dentist’s chair”. This humorous yet telling detail speaks to the power of memory—how an intense, sensual experience can remain so vivid that it surfaces in the most unlikely circumstances, even in pain or discomfort.

The final shift in the poem is the most striking. The speaker finds the friend again, not in person, but in “Zimmer’s book of Indian Art”. Suddenly, the personal transforms into the artistic, the historical, the mythic. The friend reappears, but in a different form—“Dancing in that life with / Grace and love”, adorned with “rings and / A little golden belt”. This rediscovery is bittersweet: the speaker recognizes something in this artistic representation that aligns with his memory of the friend’s youthful freedom, but also senses an irretrievable loss. The phrase “where you belong” suggests that the speaker believes the friend’s true self is better reflected in this ancient, sacred art than in their current existence.

The final lines contrast the “wild Deva life” of the past with “this dress-and-girdle life” of the present. The phrase “You’ll ever give / Or get” lands like a quiet lament, as if the speaker believes that the constraints of modern life—social expectations, conventional roles—have stripped the friend of their natural grace and love. It is unclear whether this is an actual critique of the friend’s transformation or simply the speaker’s own nostalgia and longing for the past. Either way, there is a deep sense of mourning—both for the person the friend once was and for the irretrievability of youth itself.

"For a Far-Out Friend" captures the way memory distorts and sanctifies, how relationships shift and fracture, and how art, love, and violence intertwine. The poem is layered with Snyder’s signature elements—Buddhist vision, sensual experience, and reverence for the natural world—while remaining deeply personal. The speaker is both haunted by and in awe of the friend, who exists now in two forms: the real, changed person of the present and the idealized, eternal figure preserved in memory and art. The poem ends not with resolution but with recognition—that time transforms all things, that people drift into different lives, and that what once seemed divine is now only a distant echo.

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