POEM: TAMBERLAY

Tamberlay

Great Leopard’s come to Tamberlay!

I saw it in a dream:

Baboons flee in anger

across the yellow stream.

Forest animals scatter,

from mole to swiftest deer,

some to earth and some to sky,

away from all they fear.

And from the crested treetops

birds leave their airy perch

to follow on Great Leopard

as he starts his bloody search.

Thus, in woods at sunset

the hunter begins his prowl.

Under silent, fading trees

he laughs and starts to growl.

“Where think you’ll hide this night?

Where think it is you’ll go?

Your blood I smell like sweetest wine;

your hiding place I know.

Long have I been from Tamberlay;

much is changed now in the land.

Some things still remain the same—

fear’s taste and trembling's hand.

I walk through trees in silence.

My foot pads none do hear.

On limbs I scour darkness.

My senses are my seer.”

And Great Leopard claims his kingdom

by sinew, tooth and claw.

And in my dream I shudder

at what’s bloody in his jaw.

I ALWAYS LIKED THIS POEM, with its simple metre and rhyme scheme. The title I recall coming from a dream I had, and waking with “Tamberlay” in my head; don't know where it came from. The poem is a fable, with a returning despot who has been away for some. Leopard is powerful, confident and unchallenged by the forest dwellers. It is set in a dream told by a narrator who has woken and is perhaps sounding the alarm to the residents of Tamberlay. Or not. We don’t know if he or she is speaking directly with anyone or is addressing the reader, or just themselves, or by the poem’s end even whether they are awake or not. It’s a little ambiguous (and I do love ambiguity!)

Leopard is less equivocal. He’s returned to once more rule the land and inhabitants of Tamberlay as a marauding hunter. He is a bloodthirsty and relentless predator, confident and dominant. The narrator describes the disorder Leopard’s mere presence in the forest has among the animals who flee his stealthy advance. Even birds take to the air. The narrator provides Leopard’s words which seem to confirm what the speaker and the rest of Tamberlay’s inhabitants fear—that he is there to once more prey upon them, to kill and eat them. Leopard seems to speak directly to the narrator; though this is not explicitly clear in the poem. We don’t know whether the narrator is human or another creature of the forest. We do know that he or she dreams.

Leopard taunts the narrator (or, again, Leopard may be speaking to Tamberlay as a whole, as in a monologue), saying how futile it is to try and hide from him; he can smell their blood, and “taste” their fear, which is like rare wine for him, and while there have been some changes since he’s been away, “fear’s taste and trembling’s hand” remain the same. And that’s interesting.

Originally, I had written trembling as an adjective describing "hand", but changed it to the possessive, making it a noun instead. In a way this makes sense. It adds to the layer of abstraction along with "fear’s taste"—whatever fear might taste like, something nasty, I expect. Both descriptions suggest it is not the taste of flesh that is unchanged for Leopard. By turning "trembling" from an adjective to a noun we see it is fear and trembling, the emotions experienced by Leopard’s prey, that have remained unchanged.

Trembling is the physical manifestation of fear, and my point is that Leopard seems less interested in the actual taste of flesh or even which prey he eats. Instead, he seems interested in the emotions fear causes in his prey, which is an abstraction and not something physical, if that makes sense. This may be taking things too literally, but Leopard’s statement is in the context of a dream, and I think parsing his words a little finer is warranted. (For example, he doesn't say that he likes the taste of 'that deer's flesh over there').
A little later, Leopard says his “senses” are his “seer”. In other words, he is guided by what he feels, tastes, touches, hears or sees. He is guided by the physical world and what he ‘senses’ in it. To me, that seems to be the opposite of abstract thought or reasoning. Leopard seems to be exclusively of the body. (Yet, oddly, he desires an abstraction, "fear", that he finds in his prey.) What does this mean for the narrator, who dreams Leopard and his words? A dream might be seen as ‘an abstraction of an abstraction’, in the sense it can be seen at a remove from the mind's rational processes because it is a function of our unconscious. Which makes it also at a further remove from the physical world. Or that's what we assume. Perhaps dreams are like those Russian dolls, one fitting inside the other getting smaller and smaller. Until what? They disappear? Or perhaps they emerge elsewhere. Perhaps dreams connect with the 'real' world in ways we don't understand. Maybe they go further and further away until they come back round and touch the 'real world'? For the narrator, this abstraction, this bad dream, should be just that—a bad dream. Nothing more. Why, then, is he alarmed with what Leopard has in his jaws? So the poem plays with this notion of abstract and concrete, and whether and how one will affect the other.


In the narrator's dream, Leopard will rule Tamberlay once more through his ferocious physical power. But has Leopard laid claim to the narrator's dreams, as well?
Cheers.