To Help the Monkey Cross the River

The blank-verse, unrhymed poem consists of one long stanza of irregular line lengths. Unbroken, the poem retains the feel of an cohesive inner dialogue or line of thought. The speaker of the poem is a dramatic persona, whose tone and mood are difficult to define at the poem’s opening. As the poem draws forward, the speaker’s tone is ironic and sarcastic. “To Help the Monkey Cross the River” is an ambiguous poem, with its meaning left intentionally vague. Such a poem invites the reader’s active participation to create meaning. By the end of the poem, the reader is compelled to read the poem again and pay closer attention to its lines to comprehend the full significance. The effect is deliberate; the poet wants the reader to more actively engage with the poem and create meaning. Despite the fact that the poem is open-ended and contains complex ideas, its diction is simple and catchy, and uses inventive phrases such as “snake-speed” (Line 14).

Structuring the poem as a riddle or a puzzle, the speaker deliberately plants a series of red herrings in the poem to keep the reader guessing. In Lux’s signature technique, the lines are tightly worded and spare, the imagery creative, absurd, and comic in turns. For instance, the poem begins with the speaker sitting on a platform on a tree “on the same side of the river / as the hungry monkey” (Lines 5-6), which forces the reader to visualize the respective position of both the speaker and the monkey. Yet, the poem gives no other details about who the speaker is nor why they are watching the monkey. The speaker is ambiguous about their own plan of action, asking, “How does this assist / him?” (Lines 6-7) There is a certain absurdity to what the speaker is doing here. Although the setting is evocative of a wildlife surveyor, an officer, or a documentary film maker watching the wildlife, there is a flat tongue-in-cheek tone to the poem suggesting there is a subtext and a deeper, hidden meaning to the speaker’s actions.

The speaker uses deliberate markers and details, stopping to tell the reader they look upriver first because “predators move faster with / the current than against it” (Lines 8-9). This is ironic since the statement fails to clarify either the speaker’s tone or the poem’s meaning. The poem begins to resemble is a morality fable out of Aesop’s Fables or the Panchatantra, where the animal tale is an allegory for conveying a particular lesson to humans.

The speaker considers what would happen if a crocodile upriver and an anaconda downriver headed toward the monkey at the same time. This is pure conjecture, because at this point the speaker has no way of knowing if a predator will approach the monkey. There are also a host of other variables the speaker has not even considered. For instance, what if a giant eagle swoops down on the monkey from above? The juxtaposition of conjecture with precise calculation creates humor and irony: The speaker computes “the math, algebra, angles, rate-of-monkey, / croc- and snake-speed,” (Lines 13-14), and if he determines one of the predators will get to the monkey before it can reach the other bank, the speaker will fire a few shots into the river “to hurry [the monkey] up a little” (Line 21).

Until this point in the poem, the reader has imagined that the speaker will be shooting the predators to save the monkey, so they clarify this is absurd, since “they’re just doing their jobs” (Line 22). On the surface, it seems the speaker takes the position that he will not harm the predators because they are merely following their natural instincts—not attempting a murder in the sense humans use the term. However, if this is true, why would the speaker want to meddle with the course of nature? If the speaker is so protective of the monkey, wouldn’t shooting at all compromise its life? Wouldn’t the speaker’s shooting scare the monkey? What if the shooting scares the monkey so much that it freezes? All these scenarios point to the futility of the speaker’s attempts to do anything.

In the last three lines, the speaker seems to be saying that they are focused on saving the monkey rather than killing the croc and the anaconda. The monkey deserves to be saved because it “has little hands like a child’s, / and the smart ones, in a cage, can be taught to smile” (Lines 25-26). Can the speaker empathize with the monkey because it resembles a human child? This interpretation is offset by the fact that smart monkeys can be caged and taught to smile. This may be interpreted as the speaker mocking their own affinity for the monkey because it is humanlike. Humans deem some animals more worthy of saving than others, simply because those animals display traits with which humans can identify—such as intelligence, obedience, or sociability. Thus, the human approach to the natural world is egotistical.

Another interpretation is that the monkey represents a child, or a person oppressed by institutions, which is a common theme in Lux’s works. In this interpretation, the crocodile and anaconda represent other humans forced to compete with each other for grades or better jobs. Institutions favor the monkey because the monkey can smile and be caged. Yet, in the end, the monkey remains imprisoned.

Finally, since the poem contains many phrases associated with school learning, such as terms from math (“algebra,” “angles,” “rate-of-monkey,” “snake-speed” Line 13-14), and because the speaker’s attitude can be read as pedantic, interpreting a real-world, tense situation as a math word problem, the poem could also be an allegory about the conventional learning system. In this interpretation, the monkey is a student who is “taught” (Line 26) to smile. The river is the education system promoting not excellence, but pedantry and convention. The speaker is the teacher.