18 pages • 36 minutes read
John Godfrey SaxeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Instead of cryptic or challenging verse lines, Saxe delivers a clear, clean line of purpose. The poem is based on an ancient parable, therefore Saxe plays the role of poet-teacher, and the reader is the student.
Saxe published this poem during America’s Gilded Age—relentless in its pursuit of bigger and better, pushed by the can-do spirit of a nation/culture just beginning to emerge into its majority. At that time, poets held a treasured and valued public role: to give the nation its conscience. The Fireside Poets sought to make clear the function and purpose of individuals within a society, and Saxe embraced that template. Saxe’s poem is a story, the premise of which is contrived—no reason is given for why six blind men need to understand what an elephant is—and these men are not characters, that is, three-dimensional constructs with individual, signature psychologies, and complex motivations. Rather the poem unfolds with clear predictability: The blind men cannot see what is right in front of them; the blind men are too-content with pretending their limited perception is a valid truth; and the blind men refuse to communicate and share, each too intent on their own limited perception.
When the poet steps into the poem in the closing stanza, the function is to remove an interpretative license, not to discourage creative interaction with the poem but to dispense with that function. The closing stanza shares with the reader the purpose of reading about the six blind men in a place called Indostan: that “disputants” in “theologic wars” (Line 25) too often pretend that their limited perception of a God no one can possibly understand is somehow, by some blind logic, the truth. Minus that closing stanza and the reader edges toward interpretative freedom: maybe the elephant stands for love, or for success, or for happiness, or mortality; the elephant could be anything humanity struggles to understand.
By closing the poem with a direct lesson—this is a story intended to teach tolerance specifically of other religions—the poem opens up for its Gilded Age audience. They would have nodded with a collective understanding even if the lesson might prove difficult to enact. That same reassuring wisdom, however, shuts down the poem for a contemporary audience who might balk over such an imposition of a lesson, missing the liberating freedom implicit in the modern concept of poems that suggest rather than mean, poems that offer themes and reject as patently artificial the notion of a lesson. Who is the poet to offer wisdom—is not the poet one of us, struggling to understand, enduring the joys and terrors, the agonies and the ironies of everyday busyness? For Saxe’s readers, defined then as a market (contemporary poetry, by comparison, disdains mass appeal), that lesson would be the reward for the investment of their time.