At the Zoo

O prince of the hills, king of the forests and the thickets!

O lion couched in the ease of the painful bars, as though you were a Caesar throned upon the glories of a vanished throne!

Here are the people standing about you, their eyes seized by your fierceness that speaks the language of savagery and degradation, as though a feeling of pride urged them on to stand as your equal, with nothing between you and them but a few spans and paces!

They came to you to hear the tale of your sorrows, and to learn of the transmigration of strength in your prodigious eye-sockets, that they might understand how violence dwells between the ribs, transformed in the furnace of subjugation into endurance, patience, and steadfastness!

Yet you stand before them, frozen of vengeance, noble of silence, as though all the resentment and wrath that passed over you in your grudging captivity were but part of the splendor and majesty within you! Your glances wander over the faces of the onlookers, laboring at the scrutiny of differing shapes and races, peering at the roundness of the human head, mocking the gathered movement of the two hands, and the opening of the mouth for speech and laughter and weeping!

Abject is this insolent vanity that rouses man's haughtiness before your sacred weakness!

The child sticks out his tongue at you; the grown man strikes his stick near you, spurred on by glee that you are abased; he does not shun your path, nor follow the ways of caution and reserve before your terror. And you! O most mighty of creatures, you adorn for him the lesson of the painful chains that stamp the page of a whole life with misery and disgrace! Nothing kindles existence in your inmost heart save the tear wandering over the wild eyeball that thirsts to prey!

You are ever speaking of man — of this creature who, whenever rancor stings him or hatred and harshness bite him, comes to you and finds pleasure in tormenting you, and triumph and keenness in your submission; who makes you the shrine of his cruelty and gazes at you gloating while you pace among the fetters he has prepared for your slow suicide. His neglect tramples you contemptuously, and his sinful sense smiles whenever he beholds pride in you wedded to abiding humiliation, and there spring up in his imagination the kinds of melting torment that dissolve the springs of sympathy and the landmarks of conscience from his hard, cruel members!

And when prestige and pride press upon him, and the robes of misery split away before his eyes, he finds in you the abode of his solace: he laughs at your grief and struts in vanity before your overmastered submission!

In your tremendous breast the secrets of strength and steadfastness whisper together; in your resounding roar the meanings of imprisoned tyranny take flesh; the quivering lip folds away the wisdom of the fangs that tear at livers and open up wounds! And your gaze is bitter of speech, weeping in its eloquence and its handsome pride!

Speak, O desired of the lioness! O resting-place of her tenderness and her care! What thickness of dreams throngs in your piercing pupils? Is it the forests teeming with beasts that melt your breath with longing — where speech turns to rumbling and moaning and thunderclaps of roaring? Where the souls of reptiles and birds are snuffed out, sped on their way by the fearful glance up at the rule of the giants! Does this tyranny remain rooted in you? Do you smile without end at the annihilation of precious souls, while the statue of death answers you with its blind ember?!

Dissembling, lying, is this man who bound you in iron!

For he is like you, O defeated one: he stumbles among shackles and chains; and if you glimpse his smile in hardships and calamities, it is the emblem of the valor that sets him apart from you, unique; and if the terrors have cut their furrows in his cheek, so that the smooth brow is wrinkled, the glance hardened, and the tender voice made to quaver — yet in the farthest reaches of his soul grow the faculties of sagacity, understanding, and experience! — to embrace pains with desperate strength, and to quench the embers of gloom and torment with the annihilating will that has placed in his keeping the scepter of lofty humanity!

He, man, is like you in the cage of a dreadful society: circumstances and traditions slaughter him; factionalism and fanaticism crush him; and he is humbled by the division that tyrannically separates great from mean, brilliant from obscure, male from female!

Among the shackles of states his being dissolves: the powers of matter spread the pavilion of his glory, guarding his domain and exalting his standing — or their weakness paralyzes him, and he becomes a playground for conquest and woe and ruin!

And within the chains of his own frame he is the theater where nerves and bones and blood contend, a strange abode for the pains of the soul that point at him with the finger of parting, disappointment, and humiliation, threatened forever with death and suicide!

Do you blame him, after all this, if he breathes out resolve in confining you — you, the sudden-springing assailant of unsuspecting lives! From his prudent insight he draws the necessity of your chain, O gnawer of hearts; and the hidden message folded within his breast dictates to him the gathering-in of the scattered strands of evil and denial! You do not know the ugliness of wrong and error, but noble man knows it; and between your ignorance and his knowledge lie secrets that bewilder minds, stun intellects, and unseal the hidden springs of daring and holding back! You do not know how conscience stings, how feeling tortures, how pity and mercy shed their tears; therefore you know neither feeling nor compassion, nor the sustaining of hearts!

Stand behind the strongholds of iron, and roar, crying and wailing; for more painful than all your striving is the pain of noble man in overcoming the calamities of creation! For against this small great being stand three hundred thousand species of insects, poised together with millions of microbes and atoms, intent on his destruction, along with the strange things of the unknown, the wonders of machines, the awesomeness of the heavenly spheres, and millions upon millions of destroying creatures, violent and sharp!

Stand broken and still, O emblem of the pounce and of ingratitude!

For in the vast garden — among the tormented birds and the gentle gazelles and the companionable rabbits —

is that which refines the soul and awakens sorrows!