Summary
The laughter traveling through the dictator's palace converges with the now-silenced voices and mouths of the dead. Though the dictators cannot see, there is endless mourning. This mourning acts like the falling pollen of a plant, causing leaves to grow uncontrollably in the darkness. In swampy, frightening waters, violence builds up a piece at a time, causing a snout to fill up with silence and muck. From this, a vendetta emerges.
Analysis
The poem's first ten lines focus on establishing and juxtaposing two very separate settings. One is the scene of carnage in the canefields, where dead bodies are scattered. The second is the cloistered comfort of the palace where the dictators reside. Here, in the second half of the work, these two settings converge. This convergence is illustrated through yet another striking juxtaposition. Neruda knits the scenes together with sound imagery, portraying sound as a moving, almost embodied force. The comfortable laughter of the dictators meets up with the voices of the dead. Except, of course, that their voices have been silenced. This particular point reminds us that they have been killed. But it also has a more metaphorical significance, reminding readers of the way that fascism and dictatorship can silence dissent and expression—even while those they silence are still alive.
After this point, the poem grows even more metaphorically complex, turning allegorical and spectacularly mysterious in its final lines. First, Neruda compares the grief of people living under dictatorship to the pollen of a plant. The pollen—or maybe the grief itself, since the poem's syntax leaves this point slightly ambiguous—prompts the blind, frenzied growth of new leaves and plants. These, in turn, create even more darkness and entanglement. This description evokes a lush, intriguing natural landscape near the site of human suffering. Metaphorically, it points out that mourning can be cyclical or self-perpetuating, just like the tree reproducing itself. The darkness and blindness described here may be references to the ever-present fear created by dictatorship, which can create self-censorship as effective as any externally enforced one.
Finally, as the poem ends, we shift into a seemingly new landscape—a swamp or a marsh. There, a creature is represented through synecdoche as a snout. The snout fills up with sludge and silence, eventually leading to a desire for revenge. These final moments of the poem are disturbing because it isn't entirely clear who the snout belongs to or represents. It may stand in for the dictatorship's victims, and the "silence and slime" filling it may refer simply to the deaths of these victims at the dictator's hands. But the snout may belong to the dictator(s): in that case, silence and slime are not the physical effects of death, but rather metaphors highlighting these individuals' cowardice and moral rot. In either case, though, we know that more violence is on the way—whether it's the revenge of those who have been harmed by dictatorship, or the lashing out of the dictators themselves.
