World Dream Bank: Crocodile King

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Crocodile King

Dreamed 1855/3/9 by Christina Rossetti
Hear now a curious dream I dreamed last night
Each word whereof is weighed and sifted truth.
I stood beside Euphrates while it swelled
Like overflowing Jordan in its youth:
It waxed and coloured sensibly to sight;
Till out of myriad pregnant waves there welled
Young crocodiles, a gaunt blunt-featured crew,
Fresh-hatched perhaps and daubed with birthday dew.
The rest if I should tell, I fear my friend
My closest friend would deem the facts untrue;
And therefore it were wisely left untold;
Yet if you will, why, hear it to the end.
Each crocodile was girt with massive gold
And polished stones that with their wearers grew:
But one there was who waxed beyond the rest,
Wore kinglier girdle and a kingly crown,
Whilst crowns and orbs and sceptres starred his breast.
All gleamed compact and green with scale on scale,
But special burnishment adorned his mail
And special terror weighed upon his frown;
His punier brethren quaked before his tail,
Broad as a rafter, potent as a flail.
So he grew lord and master of his kin:
But who shall tell the tale of all their woes?
An execrable appetite arose,
He battened on them, crunched, and sucked them in.
He knew no law, he feared no binding law,
But ground them with inexorable jaw:
The luscious fat distilled upon his chin,
Exuded from his nostrils and his eyes,
While still like hungry death he fed his maw;
Till every minor crocodile being dead
And buried too, himself gorged to the full,
He slept with breath oppressed and unstrung claw.
Oh marvel passing strange which next I saw:
In sleep he dwindled to the common size,
And all the empire faded from his coat.
Then from far off a wingèd vessel came,
Swift as a swallow, subtle as a flame:
I know not what it bore of freight or host,
But white it was as an avenging ghost.
It levelled strong Euphrates in its course;
Supreme yet weightless as an idle mote
It seemed to tame the waters without force
Till not a murmur swelled or billow beat:
Lo, as the purple shadow swept the sands,
The prudent crocodile rose on his feet
And shed appropriate tears and wrung his hands.
What can it mean? you ask. I answer not
For meaning, but myself must echo,
What? And tell it as I saw it on the spot.

EDITOR'S NOTES

Appropriate tears: plays on the phrase "crocodile tears"--sham grief. Rossetti's implying the Crocodile King fears the flying boat is a sort of angelic cop-car; he can't hide his crime, so he fakes remorse.
He looks weird, he enlarges, waxlike stuff oozes from his upper end, and then in the night he gets small again! What can he be? It's a pre-Freud Freudian dream! But don't get carried away and assume her Crocodile King is only about sex (or men, or greedy libidos). That does not explain the setting, or focus, or tone.
The dream focuses on the big devouring the small... but again, who specifically? That greasy scam artist on that muddy river, and the heavenly riverboat that shrinks him down to size, feel like A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's court, Mark Twain's grotesque mash-up of two Ages: the Gilded and the Dark. But that book was yet to come. And the age of truly shameless economic cannibalism, of the Social Darwinists, was still a generation ahead (Darwin didn't even publish his first paper on natural selection for three more years). But don't the dream images feel as if Rossetti's dream addresses Darwinism? Or rather, the self-justifying Victorian version of him that smiled alongside the Puritan God, as the Fit and Righeous devoured the Undeserving Poor! But Morgan and Carnegie and their toothy, acquisitive kin were harmless hatchling crocodiles when Christina dreamt this. Her nightmare's a generation ahead of her time.
Or more than a generation. Let's try a century or more! How about the Crocodile King as greasy bossman Saddam Hussein, and that winged vessel zooming up the Euphrates as the air force of George Dubya Bush, avenging white-hatted cowboy angel of the Lord! Hey, at least it explains the Iraqi setting.

Oh well! Any way you read Rossetti's dream, it feels prophetic. If uncomfortable.

--Chris Wayan

2023 NOTE

A note by her brother William Rossetti says Christina marked this poem "not a real dream" in her own 1875 copy of her collected poems. I'm astonished. She wrote at least eight other poems purporting to be dreams, but this is the one with the clearest assertion it is, and the most convincing too--the clear opening, the dreamlike broken-off ending, and the disclaimer "What can it mean? you ask. I answer not / for meaning, but myself must echo, / What? And tell it as I saw it on the spot." This insistence that the dream baffles her too is what I'd expect of a real dream; why say all this if it isn't?

Yet her own scrawled testimony declares it a fake. Baffling.

Rossetti titled this piece merely "My Dream", an unhelpful name on a site with thousands of dreams! "Crocodile King" is strictly my title of convenience. Evidence it's not a dream is from The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti (Penguin Classics 2005), p.893.

LISTS AND LINKS: reptiles - siblings, inheritance and competition - violence - food - You Are Lunch - royalty - size matters - topdogs & underdogs - ships & boats - justice - grief - tricksters - truth & lies - capitalism & business - political & social dreams - dream poetry - Xanthe's forced to wed the Reptile King in Lizard Husband - two more phallic yet pre-Freudian dream-beasties: Carl Jung's Man-Eater and Emily Dickinson's Worm - a dream 136 years later casts Saddam Hussein as a sort of crocodile: A Knife at his Throat - 2438 years earlier, an Iraqi king dreams of Nebuchadnezzar's Tree; 1752 years before that, King Sargon dreams of Inanna's River of Blood - oh, and Wayan meets Darwin in One Beagle, Three Wolves and a Setter

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