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The Fall of Ulysses: An Elephant Story

Chapter 3: Note by the Author.
By Charles Dwight Willard
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About This Book

A narrator describes buying an Asiatic elephant named Ulysses and setting about an ambitious program of training, consulting an experienced handler and employing a mahout while personally cultivating the animal’s confidence. He teaches Ulysses household tasks and a growing English vocabulary, observing remarkable intelligence and devotion. As lessons progress, the elephant’s capacities and pride create tensions between natural instinct and human expectation, culminating in an unexpected calamity for which the narrator accepts responsibility. The account examines the rewards and risks of attempting to civilize a powerful animal and the moral consequences of that experiment.

Note by the Author.

The reason that prompted Ulysses’ master to select “Sordello” as the agent of his discomfiture was, no doubt, that of all the blind and obscure work of the great poet, this is generally rated the most mysterious and perplexing. In the days when the Browning conflict raged, “Sordello” was the touchstone of the cult. To refresh the reader’s memory of its difficulties, here are reproduced a few passages taken almost at random from the poem. None of these is dependent on context for meaning, so they constitute a fair test; and the reader can put himself in Ulysses’ place.

FROM “SORDELLO”—BOOK ONE.
... To remove
A curse that haunts such natures—to preclude
Their finding out themselves can work no good
To what they love nor make it very blest
By their endeavor.—they are fain invest
The lifeless thing with life from their own soul
Availing it to purpose, to control,
To dwell distinct and have peculiar joy
And separate interests that may employ
That beauty fitly, for its proper sake.
This world of ours by tacit pact is pledged
To laying such a spangled fabric low,
Whether by gradual brush or gallant blow.
But its abundant will was balked here: doubt
Rose tardily in one so fenced about
From most that nurtures judgment, care and pain:
Judgment, that dull expedient we are fain,
Less favored, to adopt betimes and force
Stead us, diverted from our natural course
Of joys—contrive some yet amid the dearth,
Vary and render them, it may be, worth
Most we forgo.
FROM BOOK THREE.
Let stay those girls (e’en her disguised
—Jewels i’ the locks that love no crownet like
Their native field-buds and the green wheat spike,
So fair!—who left this end of June’s turmoil,
Shook off, as might a lily its gold soil,
Pomp, save a foolish gem or two, and free
In dream, came to join the peasants o’er the sea.)
Look they too happy, too tricked out? Confess
There is such niggard stock of happiness
To share, that, do one’s uttermost, dear wretch,
One labors ineffectually to stretch
It o’er you so that mother and children, both
May equitably flaunt the sumpter-cloth!

(Reader, are you “must?”)

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
  1. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
  2. Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.