KING SOLOMON AND THE ANTS
Out from Jerusalem
The King rode with his great
War chiefs and lords of state,
And Sheba’s queen with them;
Comely, but black withal,
To whom, perchance, belongs
That wondrous Song of Songs,
Sensuous and mystical,
Whereto devout souls turn
In fond, ecstatic dream,
And through its earth-born theme
The Love of Loves discern.
Proud in the Syrian sun,
In gold and purple sheen,
The dusky Ethiop queen
Smiled on King Solomon.
Wisest of men, he knew
The languages of all
The creatures great or small
That trod the earth or flew.
Across an ant-hill led
The king’s path, and he heard
Its small folk, and their word
He thus interpreted:
“Here comes the king men greet
As wise and good and just,
To crush us in the dust
Under his heedless feet.”
The king, understanding the language of insects, turns to the queen and explains to her what the ants have just said. She advises him to pay no attention to the sarcasm of the ants—how dare such vile creatures speak thus about a king! But Solomon thinks otherwise:
“Nay,” Solomon replied,
“The wise and strong should seek
The welfare of the weak,”
And turned his horse aside.
His train, with quick alarm,
Curved with their leader round
The ant-hill’s peopled mound,
And left it free from harm.
The jewelled head bent low;
“Oh, king!” she said, “henceforth
The secret of thy worth
And wisdom well I know.
“Happy must be the State
Whose ruler heedeth more
The murmurs of the poor
Than flatteries of the great.”
The reference to the Song of Songs—also the Song of Solomon and Canticle of Canticles—may require a little explanation. The line “Comely but black withal,” is borrowed from a verse of this song—“I am black but beautiful, oh, ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.” In another part of the song the reason of this blackness is given: “I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me.” From which we can see that the word black only means dark, brown, tanned by the sun. Perhaps you do not know that as late as the middle of the eighteenth century it was still the custom in England to speak of a person with black hair and eyes as “a black man”—a custom which Charles Lamb had reason to complain of even at a later day. The tents referred to in the text were probably tents made of camel-skin, such as the Arabs still make, and the colour of these is not black but brown. Whether Solomon wrote the so-called song or not we do not know; but the poet refers to a legend that it was written in praise of the beauty of the dark queen who came from Sheba to visit the wisest man of the world. Such is not, however, the opinion of modern scholars. The composition is really dramatic, although thrown into lyrical form, and as arranged by Renan and others it becomes a beautiful little play, of which each act is a monologue. “Sensuous” the poet correctly calls it; for it is a form of praise of woman’s beauty in all its details, as appears in such famous verses as these: “How beautiful are thy feet in shoes, O prince’s daughter; the joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins which feed among the lilies.” But Christianity, instead of dismissing this part of the Bible, interpreted the song mystically—insisting that the woman described meant the Church, and the lover, Christ. Of course only very pious people continue to believe this; even the good Whittier preferred the legend that it was written about the Queen of Sheba.
I suppose that I ought to end this lecture upon insect poetry by some quotation to which a moral or philosophical meaning can be attached. I shall end it therefore with a quotation from the poet Gray. The poetry of insects may be said to have first appeared in English literature during the second half of the eighteenth century, so that it is only, at the most, one hundred and fifty years old. But the first really fine poem of the eighteenth century relating to the subject is quite as good as anything since composed by Englishmen upon insect life in general. Perhaps Gray referred especially to what we call May-flies—those delicate ghostly insects which hover above water surfaces in fine weather, but which die on the same day that they are born. He does not specify May-flies, however, and we may consider the moral of the poem quite apart from any particular kind of insect. You will find this reference in the piece entitled “Ode on the Spring,” in the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas.
Still is the toiling hand of care:
The panting herds repose:
Yet hark, how through the peopled air
The busy murmur glows!
The insect youth are on the wing,
Eager to taste the honied spring,
And float amid the liquid noon:
Some lightly o’er the current skim,
Some show their gaily-gilded trim
Quick-glancing to the sun.
To Contemplation’s sober eye
Such is the race of man:
And they that creep, and they that fly,
Shall end where they began.
Alike the Busy and the Gay
But flutter through life’s little day,
In fortune’s varying colours dressed:
Brushed by the hand of rough Mischance,
Or chilled by Age, their airy dance
They leave, in dust to rest.
Methinks I hear in accents low
The sportive kind reply:
Poor moralist! and what art thou?
A solitary fly!
Thy joys no glittering female meets,
No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets,
No painted plumage to display:
On hasty wings thy youth is flown;
Thy sun is set; thy spring is gone—
We frolic, while ’tis May.
The poet Gray was never married, and the last stanza which I have quoted refers jocosely to himself. It is an artistic device to set off the moral by a little mockery, so that it may not appear too melancholy.