Monkeys
Our nearest mirror in the trees: mischief, grief and a cry poets have heard for centuries.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about monkeys: mirror imagery, classical traditions, craft techniques, honest mistakes, exercises and prompts by Writory for poets.
What this theme is
Every monkey poem is partly a mirror. No other animal watches us back with hands so like ours, curiosity so like ours, politics so like ours, and the poem's central charge comes from that closeness. Write a monkey stealing fruit from a temple stall and you are writing appetite and cunning; write a mother carrying her infant through traffic and you are writing your own family with the safety catch off. The reader always senses the resemblance, so the poet must decide how directly to use it.
The theme spans tones as few animal subjects can. Monkeys are comic, quick, irreverent, natural agents of chaos in any scene; they are also, in older traditions, voices of sorrow, their cries at dusk carrying loneliness across river gorges. Between the trickster and the mourner there is room for almost any poem you need to write.
Why poets return to it
Poets choose monkeys to write about human nature at one remove. Vanity, theft, tenderness, hierarchy, imitation: put them in fur and a tree and readers accept observations they would resist as sermon. The trickster energy also loosens a poet's line; monkey poems tend to move faster and risk more than their writers usually do.
It is a strong theme for contest work too. Judges reading for creativity and emotion, two of Writory's five criteria, respond to a subject that can pivot from laughter to ache within a stanza.
Where it comes from
Classical Chinese poetry made the monkey's cry an emblem of desolation: travellers on the Yangtze gorges, in poems by Li Bai and his contemporaries, hear gibbons calling from the cliffs and feel the full distance from home. In Japan, Basho famously heard a monkey shivering in winter rain and wished it a small straw coat, compassion compressed into three lines. In India, Hanuman, the devoted monkey god of the Ramayana, gave the animal a face of strength, humility and service that poetry still draws on.
The Chinese classic Journey to the West set the trickster Monkey King rebelling against heaven itself, and his energy runs through world literature. Western poets came late and mostly minor to the theme, which leaves it unusually open.
The elements that carry it
- Hands: fingers that peel, pick, grip and pickpocket, the anatomical rhyme between monkey and reader.
- The distant cry at dusk, inherited from the Chinese tradition, for poems of travel, exile and loneliness.
- Canopy movement, branch to branch, weight flung and caught, a rhythm poems can borrow for their lines.
- Temple roofs, market stalls and city wires, the modern monkey negotiating human territory as a resourceful migrant.
- Grooming and the carried infant, small acts of tenderness that undercut the trickster image.
Techniques that work
- Let the poem swing: enjamb lines so each reaches for the next branch, and vary line length to mimic launched and landed weight.
- Use the mirror sparingly, one moment where animal and human gestures align, rather than a running comparison the reader tires of.
- Write the cry before the creature: begin with sound at a distance, as the classical poets did, and let the animal arrive late or never.
- Set a monkey loose in an orderly human scene and track the disorder honestly, without deciding in advance whose side the poem is on.
- Steal Basho's move: notice one animal in bad weather and answer it with one small, concrete act of imagined kindness.
Mistakes to avoid
- Cheeky-monkey filler: barrel-of-fun antics with no observation underneath. Watch real footage or real animals first.
- Overworking the evolution angle. One glance of kinship outperforms a stanza of ancestry lecture.
- Colonial safari furniture, jungle chaos as exotic backdrop. Write a particular species in a particular place instead.
- Making the monkey a saint or a pest. Field observation shows both thieving and tenderness, often in the same minute.
An exercise
Watch five minutes of unedited primate footage, or recall monkeys you have actually seen. Note three gestures that reminded you of a specific person you know. Draft a poem about that person in which a monkey appears only once.
A challenge
Write a poem that begins with an animal cry heard across water at dusk and never names the creature, letting sound, distance and the listener's homesickness do all the work.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about a monkey on a temple roof, holding something it has just stolen from a pilgrim, and the odd blessing of the exchange.
Before you submit
- The poem contains one moment of kinship, not a running lecture on resemblance.
- Species and setting are specific enough to be believed.
- Trickster energy and tenderness are both available to the poem, whichever it foregrounds.
- Sound, chatter, cry or silence, is part of the poem's texture.
- The ending trusts gesture over moral.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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