18 pages • 36 minutes read
The Blind Men and the Elephant
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context
Saxe’s poem calls for religious tolerance to a nation, founded as an experiment in radical Protestantism, during an often contentious cross-examination of the efficacy of Christianity itself. However, the parable’s own historical context is perhaps more cogent. The story itself is not Saxe’s. Rather, he draws on a parable attributed to Gautama Buddha, an ascetic and spiritual teacher who lived in India in the 6th century BCE. Although historic records of the era are scant and no written version of the parable from that time exists, the poem has been traced to the Indian subcontinent. It most likely began as an oral tale passed through generations as a lesson in the dangers of pride and the foolishness of those who pretend to understand the mysteries of the world. In this, the parable reflected a decidedly Eastern mindset. Iterations of the story have defined different cultures: one version uses a statue instead of an elephant; in another, the wise men are not blind but merely in the dark; and in yet another, the elephant attacks the prodding wise men.
Saxe, reeling from the emotional traumas of losing virtually his entire family and unable to tap into the consolation he had always been taught was the special agency of the Christian God, would see the poem’s original argument—defending philosophical inquiry without the expectation of resolution and defending the logic of relativism in matters moral and spiritual—as a necessary counterbalance to his own Western culture, with its pragmatic emphasis on confident self-reliance and its faith in absolutes in matters moral and spiritual. The Methodist God did not seem to work for Saxe as he slipped into a decade-long depression. The poem, with its implicit faith in the evolutionary power of open speculation, offers a kind of optimism in the face of what Saxe began to suspect was the problem with the Christian God. Perhaps, Saxe argues using this historical parable, the only answer is for humanity to keep alive the power of intellectual investigation even if ultimate answers were simply not possible.
Literary Context
Born just after the second defeat of the British Empire in the War of 1812, his father born a loyal subject of the King, Saxe, along with his generation of poets, sought to maintain the spirit and energy of America’s first generation of poets, the Fireside Poets. Like those pioneering poets, Saxe and his generation drew foremost on the models of poetry they learned during their university educations—specifically the poets of Antiquity and the Neo-Classical poets of England. Much like that first generation, these poets perceived the poet as a public functionary vital to their culture. Poets spoke to their nation, their culture, their era. It is difficult for a contemporary audience in which serious poetry is an increasingly marginalized literary endeavor to appreciate how the depth and reach to which Saxe and his generation of poets spoke unironically to their country.
For Saxe and his generation of poets, the Fireside Poets defined a national literature by drawing, ironically, on respected inherited models of British poetics. Saxe practiced the discipline of tight meter and chiseled rhyme schemes. Like the Neo-Classical poets in Britain who attained a cultural prominence, Saxe viewed poetry through its ability to engage a vast educated middle-class market, which a boom in magazine publication targeted. Saxe dismissed as extravagant folly the idea of poetry venting the private agonies or joys of an introspective (that is, Romantic) tormented poet-figure. Poetry had a public function, part of the national enterprise now to bring together a nation reeling from an anything-but-civil war. In this poem, Saxe himself sets aside the acerbic withering wit of his pre-war satires to deliver to a troubled and divided nation the advice of cooperation and tolerance, in matters of religion and more broadly as well.
Thus, Saxe uses the vehicle of storytelling and easy-to-memorize rhythms to preach a gospel message of inspiration and optimism, poetry that soars above the story it shares to offer common sense wisdom. It is executed as a kind of comic folly that ultimately, however, delivers its profound message to a nation that learned the hard way the consequences of ignoring that wisdom.
Unlock all 18 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: