19 pages • 38 minutes read
To Help the Monkey Cross the River
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Background
Literary Context
The poem is informed by 20th-century literary and artistic movements such as surrealism, neo-surrealism, and absurdism, but cannot simply be called a surrealistic work. Lux uses surrealist and absurdist imagery and techniques as a starting point to express his vision, but unlike some surrealist works, the poem does not follow a stream-of-consciousness or arbitrary style of imagery depiction. “To Help the Monkey Cross the River” contains contradictory images and absurd questions, but those are very deliberately planted by the poet.
The allegory is the closest literary form the poem emulates. Lux termed the entire poem a giant metaphor; the initial image of a monkey swimming across a river is a metaphor for a small, helpless creature buffeted by life’s larger forces. The force could be nature or human institution, but the creature is at its mercy. The poem’s speaker wants to somehow intervene in the creature’s predicament, but they are unsure about their own motive for doing so. In this sense, the poem has strains of absurdism and existentialism, movements in which existence is futile, and absent a benevolent god.
Lux’s work is highly contemporary in form, and he eschews even the use of stanza breaks in “To Help the Monkey Cross the River.” The line lengths are irregular, and the lines enjambed—the continuation of a line of poetry onto the next without end-stop punctuation—or broken mid-sentence. However, the enjambments are deliberate, pausing where the poem would pause when read aloud. Thus, even though Lux seems to follow no fixed rules, his poems are structured by a fierce internal logic. “To Help the Monkey Cross the River” is a formal poem, as in it calls attention to its form and structure. Its last two lines have a purposeful assonance, delivering the poem’s final twisty punchline. It should be noted that Robert Desnos and Bill Knott, the two absurdist and surrealist poets Lux counts as influences, are both masters of form who would never sacrifice a poem’s structural integrity to present surrealist images.
Biographical Context
Lux was raised on a dairy farm in Massachusetts, and spent much of his childhood observing the minutiae of animal life and the natural world there. From an early age. Lux was interested in books and reading, and spent long hours at the Massachusetts library. His affinity for nature and his intellectual proclivities combine in his poetry to offer a unique perspective. Like “To Help a Monkey Cross a River,” Lux’s poems often feature the natural world. They also question assumptions humans have about nature, such as humans as superior to animals, or as the pinnacle of evolution. In “To Help a Monkey,” the speaker has mathematical ability and technology (the rifle) at their disposal, but they can’t do much to intervene in the monkey’s fate. Even their desire to save the monkey reflects human ego, since the monkey is deemed worth saving due to the way the speaker personifies it.
Because of his close observations of nature, Lux appreciates different creatures in the wild. The Cradle Place—the poetry collection in which “To Help a Monkey” was published—features poems about all kinds of animals and insects. For Lux, nature was a constant source of wonder. In an interview in The Atlantic, he talks about finding inspiration from a photographer who took pictured of insects:
That got me on a bug kick. There’s a lot of them out there. The combined weight of all the insects in the world is greater than the combined weight of all the mammals, including us! It’s estimated that there are still about 150,000 species of beetle as yet unidentified. I like beetles. Without the dung beetle we’d all be up to our clavicles in cow pies. They deserve an ode!
The poems are not nature poems in the romantic sense; most serve as allegories for existence. Lux was an intellectual with voracious and wide reading habits. He was especially interested in history and the larger processes that govern the world; all of these interests are evident in “To Help the Monkey Cross the River.”
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