To Help the Monkey Cross the River

“To Help the Monkey Cross the River” is a lyric poem by Thomas Lux, published in his collection The Cradle Place (2004). Written in unrhymed verse, the 26-line poem is but one, unbroken stanza. Despite the absence of a formal structure and meter, the poem has an internal musicality and is crafted to be read aloud. Its language is simple, witty, and inventive. The poem is a twist on a traditional animal tale and has strong elements of an allegory as its characters and events carrying deeper symbolic meaning. Open-ended and provocative, the poem is a puzzle and invites the reader’s participation to decipher its underlying meaning. Though it is influenced by 20th-century literary movements like surrealism and neo-surrealism—which emphasize dream-like and juxtaposed imagery—it cannot be called a surrealist poem. Rather, Lux uses elements of surrealism as well as absurdism (the belief that life is chaotic and unpredictable) to create his own, unique vision.

A mature example of Lux’s work, “To Help the Monkey Cross the River” is about a speaker compelled to help a tiny monkey swimming across a possibly-predator-infested river. Is the speaker able to help the monkey? Does the monkey make it across the river? Why is the speaker so invested in the monkey? These are just some questions the poem both raises and answers.

Poet Biography

Thomas Lux was born in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1946 to working-class parents. While his father Norman worked as a milkman at his brother’s dairy farm, his mother Elinor was a switchboard operator. Lux, an only child, grew up observing animal life on the farm. After a BA from Emerson College and an MA from the University of Iowa, Lux began to publish poems filled with dreamlike imagery and dark humor, inspired by the neo-surrealist (new surrealist) movement of the 1970s. He published his first book, Memory’s Handgrenade (1972) to much critical acclaim.

Lux counted surrealist and absurdist poets like French modernist Robert Desnos (1900-45) and Lux’s contemporary Bill Knott (1940-2014) as great influences, but his own poetic style favored a more direct engagement with the real. Consequently, his poems use surrealist elements like juxtaposed images to highlight uniquely human predicaments. Out of his 12 published poetry collections, his work after 1990 is considered his finest: Split Horizon (1994), received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and late collections like The Cradle Place (2004) and To the Left of Time (2016) endeared him to contemporary audiences. His mature work is filled with irony, surprise, and a meditation on life’s absurdities. Reverent toward the details of nature, Lux’s poems often upend the reader’s expectations by alternating between comedy and tragedy. His poems are often narrated by speaker personas that he personally concedes are angry, sarcastic, and a little desperate.

Apart from a writing career spanning four decades, Lux was also a celebrated teacher of writing. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College from 1975 to 2001, with visiting stints at the University of Iowa and the University of California at Irvine, among others. In 2001, he joined the Georgia Institute of Technology as the Bourne Professor of Poetry, founding the well-known “Poetry at Tech” program. Lux married Jennifer Holley Lux, a colleague at Georgia Tech. He was famous for his powerful poetry readings throughout the United States and overseas, and for his involvement in teaching writing to the community.

Lux died of lung cancer at the age of 70 at his home in Atlanta, Georgia in 2017, survived by his wife and Claudia Lux—his daughter from a previous marriage.

Poem Text

Lux, Thomas. “To Help the Monkey Cross the River.” 2004. Academy of American Poets.

Summary

A first-person speaker who may be a wildlife surveyor or forester perched on top of a branch holding a rifle narrates the 26-line poem. The speaker watches a monkey swim across a river, and although the initial premise of the poem seems ominous—the speaker could be hunting the monkey—that impression is corrected by the word “help” in the poem’s title. The speaker “must” (Line 1) help the tiny monkey cross the river in its search for food. The speaker is not sure how he can help, being at the distance that he is, yet he feels compelled to assist. The monkey could face a threat from predators in the water, so the speaker looks upriver and downriver for anacondas and crocodiles. The speaker looks upriver first since predators move faster with the current; this makes it obvious that the monkey is moving against the river’s swell. A crocodile swimming with the current could reach the monkey in a matter of seconds.

The crocodile is not the only possible predator. An anaconda could be swimming from downriver to attack the monkey. The speaker thinks the anaconda could be faster than the crocodile in water, being a water snake, yet it is swimming against the direction of the current. The speaker mentally computes all these variables to determine which predator may reach the monkey first. Depending on the calculations, the speaker makes the reader believe they will aim at the crocodile or anaconda that makes it to the monkey before it reaches the far shore.

The reader assumes the speaker lowers their rifle to shoot the predator and save the monkey, but in the last third of the poem the speaker springs a couple of surprises. First, they do not plan to shoot the predator, but just fire a few warning shots to scare it away. The predator is not wrong in approaching the monkey: It is just following the rules of nature. Therefore, the speaker is not justified in killing the crocodile or the anaconda. However, the speaker does not even want to scare away the predators with the shots, but to speed up the monkey’s progression. This approach seems puzzling until the last three lines of the poem, which reveals that the speaker’s true interest in the monkey may be different than previously assumed.

In the last three lines, the speaker visualizes the monkey with childlike hands, and comments how smart monkeys who have been caged can be taught to smile. This personification connects humanity with the animal world. The reader can surmise that “the smart ones” (Line 26) would not have been caged in the first place, but also that such a trick pulls on human heartstrings and can help the caged monkey to achieve its goals.