"Will you walk into my parlour?" said the Spider to the Fly
Technically speaking, this among the most famous lines in the history of poetry. The problem, however, is that it is almost invariably misquoted. It is far more often quoted as “Step into my parlor” than the original text. Of course, the particularities of the words does nothing to change the meaning and it is the meaning that is truly important here. That opening line, regardless of whether quoted accurately or slightly inaccurate has gone on to become a universally recognized iconic metaphor for situations in which one is unwittingly being lured into a death trap.
The earth is old! Six thousand years,
Are gone since I had birth;
In the forests of the olden time,
And the solitudes of earth.
The speaker in this case appears to be the title entity: a fossilized elephant. The speaker uses the collective term “we” to situation itself alongside the Mammoth and the Mastodon. This is a poem that speaks to a strange paradox running through the Victoria Era. This was really the first generation to submit to the mania for dinosaurs. The theories of Darwin, Lyell and others contributing to the debate surrounding the existence of fossils indicating the existence of animals that no longer existed had stimulated this obsession. At the very same time, however, the overwhelming bulk of even those who were among the dizzying crowds attending fossil exhibitions firmly and steadfastly clung to the creationist concept that according to calculations based on the timeline of the bible, the earth had existed for only about six thousand years.
Little merry Monkey, tell—
Was there kept no chronicle?
And have you no legends old,
Wherein this, and more is told?
How the world’s first children ran
Laughing from the monkey-man,
Little Abel and his brother,
Laughing, shouting, to their mother?
If there be any doubt even in the face of her poetry about mastodon and mammoth being only six-thousand years old that the poet’s consciousness and perspective is steeped in the fundamental creationist tenets of Judeo-Christian religion, one need only read this poem. It begins innocently enough, casting the monkey as the court jester of the animal world. The animal is praised for an ability to make those looking at it laugh and Nature is credited with its creation. Nature is soon enough revealed to be the Christian God of Creation, however, as the poem moves forward with its allusions to famous figures from the bible intermingled with ironically satirical jabs at the Darwinian concept that man descended from apes alongside monkeys. If that were so, the poem asks, where is all the man-like proof of evolution of the species?
The history of the monkey is finally judged relative to the history of man as the speaker asks “Is it all forgotten quite, / ‘Cause you neither read nor write.” While one cannot credit the speaker (and by extension, one suspects, the author) with being a progressive on the issue of evolution, she most certainly deserves a great deal of credit for forwarding her anti-evolution argument more subtly and artistically satisfying than most.
