And what ages of time
the worn arches of their spines support! [1]
I.
D. H. Lawrence wrote several poems featuring elephants, one of which makes the claim that they are, as a species, slow to mate:
The elephant, the huge old beast
is slow to mate;
he finds a female, they show no haste
they wait
for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts
slowly, slowly to rouse
as they loiter along the river-beds
and drink and browse
and dash in panic through the brake
of forest with the herd,
and sleep in massive silence, and wake
together, without a word.
So slowly the great hot elephant hearts
grow full of desire,
and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
hiding their fire.
Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts
so they know at last
how to wait for the loneliest of feasts
for the full repast.
They do not snatch, they do not tear;
their massive blood
moves as the moon-tides, near, more near
till they touch in flood. [2]
It's a lovely poem.
But is what it says about the mating habits of the elephant true, or is Lawrence simply constructing another of what Amit Chaudhuri identifies as a dummy creature [3]; i.e., one which fits nicely into his own philosophy, but has little or no relation to natural history or mammalian biology?
Unfortunately for those who like to believe that Lawrence has an uncanny insight into the essence of animals (and plants), I think it's the latter. That is to say, I don't think this verse tells us much about the love lives of actual elephants - and what it does tell us is misleading.
For the fact is elephants - despite their huge size and weight - are not slow to mate and have been successfully fucking and evolving for tens of millions of years (i.e., long before there were any human beings to watch and wax lyrical about their sexual habits).
II.
As is so often the case, the facts about most things - including elephant sexual behaviour - are at least as interesting as the musings of a poet. And so, for the record ...
Adult male elephants enter a state of amour fou known as musth when searching for a mate; massively increased testosterone levels produce highly aggressive behaviour and this helps them not only see off or gain dominance over potential love rivals, but increases their chance of reproductive success with the ladies (musth enables females to determine the condition of the male, as weak or injured males cannot cut the mustard).
As for female elephants, they have their own recurring periods of sexual madness when they are receptive to male advances. When on heat, they release pheromones in their urine and vaginal secretions, signalling their fertility and the fact they are ready and willing to be mounted. (Males will often collect a chemical sample from a potential mate with their trunks and analyse such with their vomeronasal organ.)
Elephants are polygynous by nature; i.e., they subscribe to a mating system in which one male lives and breeds with multiple females (although each female only mates with a single male). And once a bull elephant has his harem, he will jealously guard it, thereby ensuring paternity of any offspring that result from union with the cows.
Although Lawrence suggests elephants mate in secret, actually, for young females, the attentions of a large older bull can be intimidating, so her
relatives will often stay nearby to provide support and reassurance. The deed itself - i.e., of copulation - lasts for less than a minute and does not involve any pelvic thrusting by the male, whose penis has a remarkable degree of independent mobility.
Having ejaculated, the male's sperm then have to swim six feet in order to encounter and penetrate an egg. If all goes well and one manages this mammoth task (no pun intended), then two years later a baby elephant will be born into the world (and as an endangered species - thanks to poaching and habitat destruction - that's an increasingly rare and vital event).
Notes
[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Elephants plodding', The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 370.
[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'The elephant is slow to mate', The Poems, Vol. I, pp. 403-04.
[3] See Amit Chaudhuri, D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’: Postcoloniality and the Poetry of the Present, (Oxford University Press, 2003).
Amongst other things, Chaudhuri demonstrates how - contrary to the conventional view - Lawrence as a poet is not a simple-minded nature lover concerned with understanding the beauty and essence of real animals, but, rather, in artificially constructing creatures in and on his own terms. In other words, he recreates and imitates various birds and beasts for his own artistic and philosophical amusement, assembling a menagerie of textual mannequins.
For a sister post to this one on D. H. Lawrence and circus elephants, click here.
