[Marianne Moore, 1967]

TIPPOO'S TIGER


	The tiger was his prototype.
	The forefeet of his throne were tiger's feet.
He mounted by a four-square pyramid of silver stairs converging
						  as they rose.
The jackets of his infantry and palace guard
bore little woven stripes incurved like buttonholes.

Beneath the throne an emerald carpet lay.
Approaching it, each subject kissed nine times
the carpet's velvet face of meadow-green.

Tipu owned sixteen hunting-cats to course the antelope
until his one great polecat ferret with exciting tail
escaped through its unlatched hut-door along a plank
above a ditch; paused, drank, and disappeared -
precursor of its master's fate.

His weapons were engraved with tiger claws and teeth
in spiral characters that said the conqueror is God.
The infidel claimed Tipu's helmet and cuirasse
and a vast toy, a curious automaton -
a man killed by a tiger; with organ pipes inside
from which blood-curdling cries merged with inhuman groans.
The tiger moved its tail as the man moved his arm.

	This ballad still awaits a tiger-hearted bard.
	  Great losses for the enemy
	can't make the owner's loss less hard.



[Author's Note:]

TIPPOO'S TIGER
Derived from a Victoria and Albert Museum monograph, "Tippoo's
    Tiger," by Mildred Archer (London: Her Majesty's Stationery
    Office, 1959).
See Keats's The Cap and Bells.
"Tippoo" is the original form of the name used in the eighteenth cen-
    tury; "Tipu" is the accepted modern form.
Lines 17-20: a vast toy, a curious automaton... A mechanical tiger
    "captured by the British at Seringapatan in 1799, when Tipu Sul-
    tan, ruler of Mysore in Southern India, was defeated and killed."
    Mildred Archer.
Line 18: Organ pipes. Cf. "Technical Aspects of Tipu's Organ" by
    Henry Willis, Jr., in Mildred Archer's monograph.