The Blind Men and the Elephant

As a parable, the poem explores the nature of understanding, appreciating its ambition but acknowledging its limits.

The blind men in the poem are wise, given to analysis rather than emotion, curious, and confident in their ability to divine certainty and truth through the rigorous and careful application of observation. The poet does not mock these blind men. The premise of the poem is not to dismiss the attempts to perceive a reliable and verifiable truth in a world full of confusing and often contradictory phenomena. Each blind man is given the opportunity to expound of his particular insight—no observation is challenged in the poem, and no one wise man is exposed as a fool. Each blind man and each assertion is allowed its moment; each is allowed to stand.

Saxe was writing in an era that witnessed an explosion in the sciences as a culture began to appreciate the rewards of investigation and observation. Saxe’s insight, however, is that given such a plethora of exemplary and earnest exchange of ideas, it is evident that human understanding, while impressive in its reach and its breadth, is limited. No one wise man here is wise enough, and even assembling all of their observations into a single reality still falls short of the goal of absolute understanding. The elephant is never entirely defined; the elephant sings free of the well-intentioned efforts to understand it. Understanding, then, is necessarily an expression of subjectivity, each person only as insightful as their particular blindness will allow. Saxe’s cautionary tone advises respecting the goal of human understanding but accepting that as an absolute, human understanding is literally only human.