John Godfrey Saxe (1816–1869) was a New England poet and comic wit — of the kind much invited to be an after-dinner speaker. James Thomas Fields remains the model of such figures in that era (and so The New York Sun ran his poem “The Alarmed Skipper” as a Poem of the Day last fall). But Saxe was in the same camp, with such comic verses as “Rhyme of the Rail” and “The Puzzled Census Taker,” together with the charming “King Solomon and the Bees.”

The problem is that Saxe, unlike Fields, also wanted to be a politician, and he chose the wrong side of Northern thought about slavery and the Civil War, which made him unpopular in abolitionist Vermont. Two bad defeats in his try for governor led to his moving to upstate New York, where he discovered that his politics were still unpopular. (Less so downstate, where he was a featured speaker at an 1866 mass rally in New York City opposing Reconstruction.)

His comic verse, however — appearing in the Knickerbocker magazine and collected in book form by James Thomas Fields’s Boston publishing firm, Ticknor and Fields — continued to appear. And it’s worth noting, here in the unforgivingness of our own censorious age, that he remained popular in everything but his bad politics. After a string of family deaths, he became a recluse late in life, but the state legislature remembered him enough to have his likeness chiseled in the “poet’s corner” of the Great Western Staircase at the New York State Capitol.

With “The Blind Man and the Elephant,” Saxe introduced Americans to a Hindu parable of six experts whose partial views of an elephant produce six different descriptions. In ballad meter, Saxe romps happily through to the obvious conclusion: “Though each was partly in the right, / And all were in the wrong.”

The Blind Man and the Elephant
by John Godfrey Saxe

It was six men of Indostan 
To learning much inclined, 
Who went to see the Elephant 
(Though all of them were blind), 
That each by observation 
Might satisfy his mind.
The First approached the Elephant, 
And happening to fall 
Against his broad and sturdy side, 
At once began to bawl: 
“God bless me! — but the Elephant 
Is very like a wall!”

The Second, feeling of the tusk, 
Cried: “Ho! — what have we here 
So very round and smooth and sharp? 
To me ’t is mighty clear 
This wonder of an Elephant 
Is very like a spear!”

The Third approached the animal, 
And happening to take 
The squirming trunk within his hands, 
Thus boldly up and spake:
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant 
Is very like a snake!”

The Fourth reached out his eager hand, 
And felt about the knee. 
“What most this wondrous beast is like 
Is mighty plain,” quoth he; 
“’T is clear enough the Elephant 
Is very like a tree!”
The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear, 
Said: “E’en the blindest man 
Can tell what this resembles most; 
Deny the fact who can, 
This marvel of an Elephant 
Is very like a fan!”
The Sixth no sooner had begun 
About the beast to grope, 
Than, seizing on the swinging tail 
That fell within his scope, 
“I see,” quoth he, “the Elephant 
Is very like a rope!”
And so these men of Indostan 
Disputed loud and long, 
Each in his own opinion 
Exceeding stiff and strong, 
Though each was partly in the right, 
And all were in the wrong!

Moral:
So, oft in theologic wars 
The disputants, I ween, 
Rail on in utter ignorance 
Of what each other mean, 
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.