The poem "Jaguar" by Francisco Alarcón is park of a collection called Animal Poems of the Iguazu, which gives a little bit of extra context as to its meaning.
Iguazu is a huge park in Argentina and Brazil and very near the border with Paraguay. It's a huge area known for impressive and abundant waterfalls and a thick jungle which was once home to many, many animals.
Today Iguazu is a big tourist destination, and visitors see a lot more people than animals. This is one of the things Alarcón is trying to address in the poem. It's about the changes in nature and the fact that there are so few areas left in the world that can be considered wild.
His poem is written as though the jaguar is the speaker, which creates a bond between animal and reader. He wants us to understand the sadness that comes with extinction and endangered animals.
However, the poem itself is not sad. In fact, it has an empowering and hopeful tone, as he shows the ways that wildness is still very real and present in Iguazu. He talks about the nature that does exist and can't be erased, and the poem talks about resilience, power, and endurance.
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The jaguar is speaking directly to his human audience. He explains that his species is almost extinct in a certain park. However, his message is—and this is theme of the poem—that even if it should transpire that there are no more jaguars in the park, their spirit will always remain there.
The jaguar narrator is telling his audience that the soul of the jaguar forever permeates the park. It is in the scent of the orchids, for example, which is where one finds
the fragrance
of my chops
It is also in the rumbling of the waterfalls, which holds
my ancestors'
great roar
The speaker goes even further, intimating that the soul or spirit of the jaguar inhabits the universe. He says that when people look at the stars in the sky at night, they are seeing the spots of the jaguar's coat.
The jaguar is stating that his species expresses the spirit of the entire jungle and will do so even if every living jaguar perishes.
This poem can be interpreted in several ways. However, my understanding of it is that the poet, Alarcón, is attempting to draw attention to the plight of the jaguar, now "almost extinct in this park" by emphasizing what the jaguar represents in the grander scheme of things—"the wild untamed living spirit of this jungle." The jaguar is a key part of this ecosystem: its "ancestors' great roar" can be heard in the waterfalls and "the constellations of the night sky" might as well be "star spots" on the jaguar's fur. In a way, the poet may be suggesting that the jaguar can never become extinct in truth because it is so embedded in the natural landscape that it will always exist there in memory, but that suggests a passivity inherent to those who simply say that the jaguar "is almost extinct" without pausing to consider the ramifications of this. The rest of the poem draws a bone-deep connection between the jaguar and the land it was born in and the earth around us; if we allow the jaguar to become extinct, the poet is perhaps suggesting, we must expect that eventually all the beautiful elements of our natural world will suffer the same fate, because all of them are connected.
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