Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, A PRE-ADAMITE ON EVOLUTION, by AMELIA WOODWARD TRUESDELL


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

A PRE-ADAMITE ON EVOLUTION, by                    
First Line: An aged king of gorillas sat
Last Line: Nor dreamed that her kind could be free.
Subject(s): Animals; Apes; Darwin, Charles (1809-1882); Evolution; Nature; Gorillas; Chimpanzees; Gibbons; Orangutans


An aged king of gorillas sat
By the side of his wrinkled spouse;
Beneath a drooping banana tree
They renewed his birthday vows.

Quoth he, while a bunch of the fruit he plucked
To lay at her royal feet;
"To burden this day with forebodings of state,
I know that it is not meet;

"But my heart is sore for the future youth,
For our tribe and the very race.
A nation's weakness approaches fast
In the changes of form and face.

"Of seven full generations now
Patriarchal chief am I.
Not a son has the strength his father had;
They carry their heads too high.

"There goes our cousin Chimpanzee, the knave;
Ignominious shelter he makes,
To hide himself from the foe and the storm,
With a shelter of brushes and brakes.

"O degenerate sons of the future gorilla,
Can you hurl great rocks at the foe;
Can you lash them with trees? Can you frighten the beasts
With a voice they have learned to know?"

And he beat his great breast with concussion profound,
At his people's evolving disgrace;
But his queen held her peace till his wrath should abate;
This dame knew her proper place.

"Does my lord forget," she ventured at last,
"When he came a-courting of me,
That I was more fair than my mother had been,—
He deemed it most good to see?

"And the fathers find nothing more worthy today
In the stories of ancient wives,
Than the deed of a modern gorilla maid
Whose tact saved a hundred lives.

"Has your highness a stride less majestic and firm
Than his sires who went on all four?
And we lack not the berries and betel nuts
Though we swing in the tree tops no more.

"And recall how our foes have been vanquished
By the traps our children designed;
Perhaps Nature may reach compensation at last
In a race of a subtler mind."

But he shook his grey head in a muttering storm:
"Such degeneration will bring
The noble race of Gorillas ere long
To a pale-faced naked thing.

"A creature so weak and enfeebled he'll be
That in two generations he's old;
His short arms may drop off altogether, I fear,
Like the tails of which we are told.

"A weakling, short-armed and bald-headed forsooth!
Afraid of the cold and the heat!
When the mermaids at twilight are singing their psalms,
He'll do for the shore's front seat.

"Ha! The females of that generation!" he roared
Again, as if struck with new woes:
"Will they stalk through the forest, unblushing and bold?
Who'll marry such creatures as those!"

"Perhaps," said his listening target again,
"Those fair Gorillítas might twine
For their shivering bodies some cover of grace
With the leaves of the clinging vine.

"And then there's the plantain, and fig leaf so broad,
And the frond-bordered fern and the brake."
Thus early did instincts Parisian appear
The masculine scorn to awake.

"A female in plantains and fig leaves beswaddled,
And tied round with twisted sticks!"
Sneered her lord. "Have you, my dear Madam, I pray,
Been trying such ladylike tricks?"

"My tribe in banana leaves bandaged and hid,
Whose arms scarce hold their own weight,
And sleeping in shelter of rushes and ferns,—
Call you this a higher estate?

"Don't tell me of better conditions again;
I'm sick of this twaddle, quite!
I say if this fad of evolving goes on
Our race will be out of sight."

He had asked for his lady's opinion, 'tis true;
Then scornfully threw it away;
But the world has evolved to such blessed estate,
That the male never does so to-day.

But this king, undeveloped and crude of mind,
Into fury had lashed his wrath;
And he crashed through the forest despoiling at will
Every helpless thing in his path.

His queen, whose inherited kingdom he ruled,
To the shade of their household tree,
On her back bore the nuts and banana-branch;
Nor dreamed that her kind could be free.





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