18 pages • 36 minutes read
John Godfrey SaxeThe Blind Men and the Elephant
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1872A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Blindness
In keeping with the theological argument posed by Saxe, both Old and New Testaments have a long history of using blindness to suggest the limited perceptions of those not fully attuned to the salvation message of the Judeo-Christian God. The prophets caution that blindness leads to graver consequences.
Saxe uses a similar logic, as the blindness in the poem suggests only a limited perception. The blind men are not a problem because they are blind—they are a problem because they do not accept the limits of their very limited perceptions. They are too content in their “utter ignorance” (Line 26), meaning that they are simply lacking critical information. As they “prate on” (Line 27), disputing “loud and long” (Line 22) about something they cannot comprehend, the blindness is not the problem. The problem is that limited understanding should lead to the wisdom of tolerance and the logic of humility, rather than justifying arrogance and self-satisfaction.
The Elephant
The elephant that exists at the center of the parable symbolizes the hope humanity sustains that the material world is not the end-all of life.
It is difficult to position the elephant itself within the poem’s narrative; for the blind mean, “elephant” is a word, an abstract. None of the six men ever see the elephant—the only one who sees the elephant is the poet, and, by extension, the reader. For the reader, the elephant is reassuringly there; thus, readers enjoy the antics of the blind men struggling to piece together some fragmentary perception of what readers see so clearly.
The poet cautions that humanity is blind when it comes to theology—passion, arrogance, and even logic are not sufficient. Just as the blind men will never see the elephant, no one in more than 6,000 years of “theologic wars” (Line 25) has shed their blindness and gained a clear picture of God. Thus, the elephant does not so much symbolize God; the elephant suggests the collective faith in God that humanity has maintained across millennia. What matters is not the limited and suspect conclusion of a theologian but the search itself.
The Side, the Tusks, the Tail, the Knees, the Trunk, and the Ears of the Elephant
The premise behind the poem’s parable is that humanity struggles for truth and yet can never attain it. The different parts of the elephant reveal to each blind man a valid and yet erroneous conclusion, which none is gifted to appreciate. Many partial truths are accepted as one complete truth. In this, the poem argues against its culture’s own faith in the step-by-step analytical processes of scientific investigation, its faith that clues move toward solution, that bits of reality is sufficient to reveal that reality. Although it does not present itself as an epistemological inquiry—that is, an anatomy into the process of thinking and the logic of coming to a conclusion based on intellectual arguments rather than opinions—the poem is a persuasive investigation into both the power of the intellect and its limitations. For instance, when the fourth man touches the elephant’s knee and concludes, logically, that the elephant must be like a tree, the absurdity of this conclusion is lost on the blind man.
The poem breaks down the animal into its constituent parts to show that no truth is whole or maintains the integrity of a single entity. To do so, the most complex realities—not just God, for example, but love, success, happiness, commitment, the soul, the afterlife—would be easy to comprehend, understanding love no more complicated than understanding a chair. For the poet, these elemental parts of the whole that never entirely yield perfect understanding are the stuff of optimism, the justification for each person to explore and question their world. In the end, humanity needs those blind men, those fragments of truth, if only to appreciate the grandeur and wonder of a universe that will never be decoded into simplification.
