Blind men and elephants
By watersprite
@watersprite (168)
August 14, 2012 7:22am CST
I have just stumbled across a fabulous poem called "The blind men and the elephant", go search for it if it's unfamilliar. It describes in verse how a number of blind men react differently to an elephant dependant on which part of it the encounter, has quite a clever moral (again in verse) at the end. It's left me smiling and thinking, wish I'd come up with the idea!
3 responses
@watersprite (168)
•
14 Aug 12
Go for it, there a load of back ground information on wikipedia (when is there not!), but the actual poem is not there, I presume due to copy right issues, it says the english version is by John Godfrey Saxe
@Raine38 (12389)
• United States
14 Aug 12
I remember this poem in 6th grade, in World History. It's how the bind men describes an elephant, like the first man says it's like a wall, the second man says it's like a tree trunk, then another says it's like a snake. Yeah, I agree that it does teach us a good lesson on how something can be perceived and seen differently by different people. At first, I find it hard to interpret and read. But now that I am much, much older, I can't help but smile on that particular day we discussed it.
@watersprite (168)
•
14 Aug 12
Never covered anything like this at school, though that was many years ago and I may have forgotten, we did watch the whole of the original Star Wars trilogy though and to explain why it was a fairy story, even though it's in space (I didn't get much out of that lesson either).
@nyssa102 (748)
• United States
14 Aug 12
This is true and unique. This is why we must be the captains of our own lives and hearts. This is why only we must take responsibility for our own decisions in life. This is a very important and useful poem. Everyone see's the same thing differently. What if that same thing is your life? What if that thing that everyone is looking at and picking at and touching is your choices? For me all other people are blind to my life, that is the truth. No if's and's or but's about it, all are ignorant of my life and my choices. Therefore I believe strongly in the message of poems like this. I saw one example, where this man was intelligent, but hung with silly people. He tried to go to college and they nagged him. He gave up college because his friends made fun of him. I saw an intelligent man, his friends viewed him as stupid just for trying to better himself. He talked to me and them. They won. Their vision of him is the one he took to robe himself with and that is a very sad thing indeed. Moral, all are blind when they attempt to touch your life. You have to be strong and make excellent and brave choices :D
