14Conclusion: The Partial Pachyderm
We begin with a rather obscure American poet: John Godfrey Saxe. Saxe was born in Vermont in 1816 and worked throughout his life as a lawyer and newspaper editor in addition to writing poetry. His only famous piece of verse is a poem titled “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” a retelling of a classic Indian fable. The poem opens in India with six blind men approaching an elephant in order to better understand what the animal looks like as a whole. (The fact that these men, presumably, have lived their entire lives in India but have never encountered an elephant prior to this occasion is never addressed.) The first man feels the side of the elephant with his hands, proclaiming to the others that it is best understood as something like a living wall: rough, hard, and very large. The second man, eager to join the first, happens to grasp on to the elephant’s tusk instead of its side. As a result, he loudly disputes the first man’s claim and says that the elephant is really more like a spear: smooth, pointy, and sharp. Each of the other four men approach the elephant in succession, and each provides his own interpretation of what an elephant really looks like: a snake, when grasping the animal’s trunk; a tree, when touching its legs; a fan, when caressing its large ears; and a rope, when holding on to its tail. An argument ensues. Saxe concludes the poem by imparting a moral to the reader ...
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