Some Thoughts on The Lion’s Bride
The poem, a sonnet, appears to tell the story of a lion-keeper’s daughter who is killed
by the lion which she had come to trust.
This reading of the poem is hardly satisfactory – it fails to account for much of the
poem’s frightening power, and for the ways in which this has been achieved.
In particular, it fails to account for the type and intensity of the relationship which
develops between the lion and the female human who attends it.
There are two key choices made by the poet which were crucial in determining how
the poem was to develop. The first was the choice of the lion as the bridegroom; and
the second was the choice to relate the whole series of events from the lion’s point of
view.
The Sheep’s Bride would simply not have worked!
A further fact to be grasped is that the poem is essentially an elaborate and carefully
thought-out metaphor. The alleged lion/human bride relationship which takes place in
some vaguely-sketched ‘real’ world is in fact the metaphoric means by which the poet
is able to explore a whole set of complex and potentially destructive human
relationships.
That is, the world of this poem is not the detailed, concretely presented real world of
say, In the park, or The secret life of frogs. It is an intensely internal and personal
world, the world experienced and created the lion/man. It is a psychological,
emotional, moral world in which the significances of human relationships are
dramatised and developed.
The metaphor helps create the world in which these relationships are born, fought out
and die.
These relationships – and they essentially deal with love and its sexual expression –
involve such issues as:
 the place of power, and the exercising of power, in sexual relationships
 the male, as opposed to the female, attitudes to love and sex
 the question of ownership, of possession and possessiveness in relationships
 the meaning and significance of our marriage conventions
 the power and consequences of self-delusion
 the power and consequences of selfish and egocentric passion
 the role of the female in relationships of this type
 the question of the ‘true’ nature of our romanticised views of love and
marriage
Such a lot to pack into 14 lines!
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Note the first verb: “loved”. The poem is to explore the meaning of this word
– its asks, among other things, What is love? At least, what does love mean to
this lion/man?
It is firstly, a sensual apprehension/understanding. It involves touch and
smell; it has a physical reality, and it is this reality which dominates the
consciousness of the lion/man, of the mind which loves
So what the lion loved was her “softness”, her “warm smell”, her “dark” hair
“flowing loose”. There is touch and smell and sight and movement in the
description.
Note the implications/connotations of the adjective “dark”: it surely refers to
more than colour. There is suggested the dark of night, of dark deeds, of a
moral darkness – at least as perceived by the lion
A similar point must be made about the adjective “loose”: there is, it is
implied, more than just the hair which is loose and free; the woman herself, as
created in the mind of the lion, is (morally) loose and free. This is her
attraction
That last point is crucial: the figures who exist in this poem – the woman, her
father, the woman-bride – are created by the lion’s consciousness; they are
contructs of his way of interpreting and responding to reality.
And then there is the direct admission: “stirred by rank longing”. The
adjective “rank” is perfect – consider some of its meanings:
a. full, large or gross in size, quantity, etc
b. having an offensively strong smell
c. corrupt, foul, festering
d. coarse, thick
There is no doubt that the longing is lust, and pretty foul lust at that!
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Note too how this lust swallows up the existence of the person as a person: the
sentence lacks a subject; the “I” has been omitted. The lion/man becomes
nothing but lust, nothing but the emotion and the action.
The metaphor is most consistently developed: hair is mane; head/face is
muzzle. The perception of the female is that of an animal – what does this say
about the quality of the love which is being offered?
The mention of the father introduces the possibility of the presence of another
metaphor: the convention by which the father “gives away” the daughter in
marriage to the groom. There is, in the unfolding action of the poem, a strong
reminder of this ceremony: father and groom conspire with religion and law to
claim rights over the bride.
So “He [the father] fed me well.” He does indeed – he gives the lion/man his
daughter as dinner!
Note the gloating intensity of the lion’s claim to a “special” relationship. How
much is it shared by the ‘bride’?
When she brings him dinner, he sees the act as as being of some special
significance. It becomes a “love feast”. Note the connection of the idea of
love, with the (physical, sensual) idea of eating – and not just eating, but
feasting. The lion/man cannot separate the two perceptions.
“brute king and tender woman”: this is perhaps the clearest direct statement of
the oppositional, contrasting, nature of man and woman. To be masculine is
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to be brutal, powerful, dominant; woman is tender, soft, submissive. It is
important to remember here that this is the lion’s view.
Note also the full meaning of the word “tender”: it can apply to food as well as
to emotions, and the woman is to become a very tender morsel indeed!
Note the ironies in the lion’s claim that he and his love meet “soul to soul”:
there has been nothing spiritual at all in his description of their relationship –
quite the opposite. (The rhyming of “soul” with “bowl” is revealing and
instructive.) And what meeting can there be between human and animal soul?
Do lions have a soul? Do such brute men as the lion represents have a soul?
A clarification here: the lion doesn’t so much represent a type of man as he
does a potential, a sexual and savage energy, a primitive but powerful way of
thinking and feeling, which (says the metaphor) informs to some degree all
human relationships. And it is terribly destructive.
And so the bride, dressed in traditional white, is offered up to the lion. And
what does he see?
The woman who enters is not real to him; she is someone else – a perfumed
spectre in white, veiled and hidden from him. It is of course the same woman;
the distorted representation derives from his distorted perceptions.
Enraged at the imposter, furious that she “breathed/our secret names”, he kills
and devours her.
The terms used to describe the killing are revealing: “engorged” means “to
gorge, feed or fill to excess”, “to devour greedily”. A secondary meaning
refers to a filling or swelling with blood, so “engorgement”. I wonder if, once
again, the act of eating is not connected quite deliberately here, with another,
equally basic and necessary act – one which we might loosely call the act of
love.
Then the shock of discovery that this spectre, this apparition, this ghost has
flesh and blood, or as the lion puts it “bones, and meat”. It’s not an image he’s
devouring, not an abstract idea – it’s the woman herself. What a terrible
metaphor for love and marriage – we are surely reminded of other lines in
other poems:
“Not flowers, no, animals that must eat or die” The Sea Anemones
“ ‘They have eaten me alive’ ” In the park
The degree of his self-delusion, of his ignorance of the real woman whom he
loves, is displayed in the final line:
“Come soon, my love, my bride, and share this meal.” He doesn’t realise yet
that he has killed her. Will he ever come to this realisation – that his love is,
must be, destructive?
The poem sees human sexual love as somehow inevitably involving the
sacrifice of the woman; that there is something dangerously destructive in
love.
Oscar Wilde’s insight is relevant here: “Yet each man kills the thing he loves.”
The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
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Use one or more of the following selections as the basis for a
discussion of the poetry of Gwen Harwood.
The Lion’s Bride
I loved her softness, her warm human smell,
her dark mane flowing loose. Sometimes stirred by
rank longing laid my muzzle on her high.
Her father, faithful keeper, fed me well,
but she came daily with our special bowl
barefoot into my cage, and set it down:
our love feast. We became the talk of town,
brute king and tender woman, soul to soul.
Until today: an icy spectre sheathed
in silk minced to my side on pointed feet.
I ripped the scented veil from its unreal
head and engorged the painted lips that breathed
our secret names. A ghost has bones, and meat!
Come soon my love, my bride, and share this meal.
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