Leconte de Lisle: "The Jaguar's Dream"

Here's one of those poems that grabbed me, and I had to keep coming back to read it.


The Jaguar's Dream

Lianas in bright bloom hang from mahogany shade,
Motionless where the air is languorous
And buzzing with summer flies.  Brushing the moss,
They curl into cradles clutched by the emerald quetzal, swayed
Wildly by monkeys, spun with the yellow spider's silver floss.
Here the bull-killer, slayer of stallions, tired,
Moves among dead tree-stumps moist and soft as sponge,
Implicit violence in his measured tread.
Pelt shimmering with each muscle's plunge,
While from his bay-wide muzzle, drooping with thirst,
A clipped, harsh, rattled breathing shocks
Huge lizards from their sun-trance to a burst
Of chrome-green sparkling over shadowed rocks;
And there where the dark wood blots the sun,
He sprawls across a lichened stone,
Licks satin paws to a lustrous sheen,
Flutters the sleep-heavy lids of gold eyes down
And, as the ghost of his waking force
Twitches his tail and ripples along each side,
He dreams that by some orchard's water course
He leaps and digs his dripping  claws
Into a bellowing bull's flesh-swollen hide.

Charles-Marie Rene' Lecontede Lisle  (1818-1894)
from World Poetry:  An Anthology of Verse
from Antiquity to Our Time  
trans. James Lasdon



I don't know what this poem means or if it is symbolic or metaphorical or allegorical.  It's inner, hidden, deeper meaning escapes me.  It must be the imagery here that attracts me.  A picture is supposed to be worth a thousand words, but I doubt if a thousand pictures could accomplish, for me anyway, what these few words some how manage to do.