Elinor Wylie, an American poet and novelist of the 1920s, made her name with compact, musical lyrics that often turned emotional turmoil into allegory. She wrote at a time when many poets valued polished form even while exploring psychological extremes; her work stayed taut, symbolic, and fascinated by love’s dangerous edge. “The Lion and the Lamb” belongs to that vein. It looks almost like a fable, yet its emotional stakes are fiercely adult.
The poem stages a confrontation in a stark desert landscape. A tiger with a “golden flank” drinks at a spring and is immediately named Hate. Nearby a “placid Lamb” lies asleep, and the tiger attacks with the speed of a “river from its dam.” Then a third figure appears: a “Lion tawny-red, / Terrible and brave.” The tiger’s leap “Broke like a wave,” and the tiger fades “like a flame” in the sand or sun. The lamb says, “I am Love,” and asks the lion for its name. The lion answers with a thundering voice, “I am Love. By this spring, / Brother, let us rest.” The central idea is not simply that love defeats hate; rather, love has more than one face. The lamb is love’s gentleness, and the lion is love’s courage and strength. Hate, for all its flash, burns itself out, while love remains and turns the dangerous spring into a place of rest.
The construction reinforces that idea. Five quatrains with alternating rhyme give the poem a hymn-like, almost ballad-like motion, and the short lines keep the fable moving swiftly. Capitalized words such as Hate and Love function like characters in a moral play, while softer images such as “placid Lamb” and “fast asleep” collide with the violence of “Flashed the Tiger’s leap.” The contrast is essential: hate is bright, sudden, and forceful, while love first seems passive. Yet the lion is “Terrible and brave,” not tame. The image of the tiger’s attack breaking “like a wave” suggests that aggression can be powerful but cannot hold its shape. A wave rises and crashes; the lion simply absorbs it. Likewise, the tiger fades “like a flame,” as if hate is mostly heat and light with little endurance.
The desert spring gives the poem its center of gravity. Water draws both the tiger and the lamb, which suggests that hate depends on the same source as love but turns that source into an ambush. The lion’s voice thunders and shakes his “vaulted breast,” giving love a bodily, resonant power rather than making it abstract. When the lion says “Brother, let us rest,” the spring becomes what it should have been all along: a shared refuge, not a trap. Wylie avoids a sentimental ending. The tiger is not killed, and hate is not destroyed; it simply fades from the scene. Love’s victory is peace, not revenge.
What makes the poem significant is its compressed, memorable way of showing that gentleness is not weakness and that hatred often collapses under its own force. Wylie’s formal control stops the fable from feeling preachy; the images, not the speaker, carry the moral. For readers, the poem offers a symbolic vocabulary for emotional conflict: a tiger can be a destructive impulse, and a lion can be the fierce commitment that refuses to let it win. The final line is not a battle cry but an invitation, and that restraint is the poem’s real strength.