Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Gary Snyder’s "T-2 Tanker Blues" is a sprawling meditation on labor, literature, isolation, and the vastness of both the sea and the human mind. Written from the perspective of a seaman on a T-2 tanker—one of the oil-carrying ships used extensively during and after World War II—the poem encapsulates the tension between industrial work and philosophical inquiry, between the physical and the metaphysical. Snyder’s speaker, immersed in the mechanical rhythms of maritime labor, moves between disgust and transcendence, using the sea as both setting and metaphor for his restless, searching mind.

The poem’s free verse structure and lack of punctuation in key sections create a stream-of-consciousness flow, reflecting the wandering nature of thought during long, monotonous stretches at sea. The opening lines—"Mind swarming with pictures, cheap magazines, drunk brawls, low books and days at sea"—establish an atmosphere of mental clutter. The speaker’s thoughts are crowded with vulgarity, boredom, and resentment, yet this jumble of imagery is immediately contrasted with an urge toward solitude: “I sit on the boat-deck finally alone.” This moment of stillness, borrowing the “oiler’s dirty cot,” provides a temporary refuge from the physical labor and crude social environment of ship life. Here, in the quiet of the deck, he sees “the moon, white wake, black water & a few bright stars.” This shift from internal noise to external vastness—the simplicity of the sky and sea—sets up one of the poem’s central tensions: the contrast between human chaos and the unthinking, cosmic order of nature.

Yet even in this stillness, the speaker wrestles with dark thoughts. His reading of the Marquis de Sade triggers reflection on cruelty, perversion, and existential challenge: “I loathe that man—wonder on his challenge, seek sodomy & murder in my heart.” This is not an admission of personal depravity but rather an engagement with the extreme provocations of de Sade’s philosophy. Snyder places de Sade’s worldview alongside “Reason and the Christian Love,” suggesting an intellectual struggle between different moral and philosophical systems. However, his ultimate perspective is one of detachment: “dig the universe as playful, cool, and infinitely blank.” The phrase signals a turn toward a more Buddhist-influenced outlook—where rather than being consumed by moral extremes, he recognizes the universe as indifferent, neither good nor evil, simply existing.

The poem then moves outward, beyond human concepts and back to the natural world. The sea is described as “inhuman,” but Snyder immediately questions this language: “The eye that sees all space is socketed in this one human skull. Transformed.” This realization dismantles the romantic notion that nature is vast while humanity is insignificant. Instead, the speaker affirms that perception itself, the very act of seeing, is what makes meaning possible. “The source of the sun’s heat is the mind,” he asserts, countering the notion that calling something inhuman makes it more powerful or sublime. This line, almost a koan, suggests that awareness itself is generative—that existence is as much defined by perception as by material reality.

Yet even as the poem reaches toward these expansive, almost mystical insights, Snyder remains grounded in the physical world. He recalls concrete images from his travels: “Recall a cloud of little minnows about our anchored ship in the green lagoon of Midway. / Corpse of a frigate-bird on the beach, a turtle-shell a foot across flesh clinging still.” These details return the poem to the realm of decaying matter, the cycle of life and death in the Pacific. The “narrow reefs” symbolize the passage between human endeavor and the unyielding sea, emphasizing the impermanence of all things.

The next section shifts into a recollection of drunken camaraderie in a Hawaiian labor hall: “Damn me a fool last night in port drunk on the floor & damn this cheap trash we read.” Here, Snyder engages directly with the contradictions of working-class life—sharing beer with Hawaiian laborers, recognizing their struggles, yet also feeling the weight of escapism, indulgence, and wasted time. His description of these workers—“Bearded and brown and all the blood of Pacific in them laughing, tattered shirts and tin hats, three-o-five an hour”—captures both their dignity and their hardship. The moment is one of brotherhood but also transience. The speaker acknowledges his own foolishness, yet he does not condemn the experience. It is simply part of the larger drift of life, much like the motion of the ship itself.

The poem’s philosophical climax arrives with the assertion: “And there is nothing vaster, more beautiful, remote, unthinking / (eternal rose-red sunrise on the surf—great rectitude of rocks) / than man, inhuman man.” Here, Snyder turns the usual nature-human hierarchy on its head. Instead of elevating the ocean, the mountains, or the sunrise above human existence, he asserts that man—particularly in his contradictions, his strivings, his absurdities—is the true vastness. This realization, framed by an imagined perspective “from a seat near Scorpio,” suggests a cosmic viewpoint in which humanity, for all its flaws, is neither above nor below nature but an extension of it.

The poem then collapses back into personal loss: “My wife is gone, my girl is gone, my books are loaned, my clothes are worn, I gave away a car; and all that happened years ago.” This abrupt transition grounds the poem in individual impermanence. Love, possessions, even identity itself are temporary, subject to the same forces of time and entropy that shape the tides and the stars. “Mind & matter, love & space are frail as foam on beer,” he concludes, distilling the Buddhist notion of impermanence into a working-class idiom.

The final lines return to the ship, now moving forward, a physical embodiment of the endless passage of time and labor: “Wallowing on and on, / Fire spins the driveshaft of this ship, full of smooth oil & noise.” The “blood of the palms d’antan” references the colonial history of oil extraction, linking the present voyage to centuries of exploitation and industrialization. Yet despite this weight of history, the ship is described in terms of its sheer physicality: “embraced in welded plates of perfect steel.” This final image does not resolve the poem’s contradictions—it simply affirms them. The ship is both a machine of war and industry and a vessel of human experience, a force that moves through the world indifferent to the lives it carries but still shaped by them.

"T-2 Tanker Blues" is one of Snyder’s most ambitious meditations on labor, philosophy, and the self. It balances moments of existential questioning with deeply material, sensory reality. The poem rejects romanticized views of either nature or humanity, instead presenting them as intricately entwined forces, each capable of brutality, beauty, and transformation. The ship, like the poet himself, moves through these tensions without resolution, carrying its contradictions forward into an unknown future.

Copyright (c) 2025 PoetryExplorer

Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!

Other Poems of Interest...