Read Your Kids Nonsense Poems

Edward Lear, The Owl and the Pussycat

Edward Lear, The Owl and the Pussycat

I taught Alice in Wonderland a couple of weeks ago and found myself thrown back to wonderful childhood memories of my father reading me Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poetry.  Authority figures in the book are always ordering Alice to recite instructional verse, like Issac Watts’ “Against Idleness and Mischief” or Robert Southey’s “The Old Man’s Comforts and How He Gained Them,” and Alice makes such a wonderful hash of them that his parodies (“How Doth the Little Crocodile,” “”You Are Old Father William”) surpass the originals.  (The originals in turn read like tongue-in-cheek parodies–compare them with Carroll’s versions here.) Children “get” poetry in a deeper way than we may think, as my Ljubljana colleague Jason Blake is discovering with his daughter.  The piece below will inspire you to read poetry to your kids, grandkids, and other children you are in contact with.

By Jason Blake, English Department, University of Ljubljana

My five-year-old daughter is the most original, most wonderful, most ingenious little girl in the world. It’s true. Any father will readily agree with that statement and say, “Yes, my child is the most original, most wonderful, most ingenious little creature in the world.” In other words, I realize I am entirely typical in seeing something incredibly special in my child.

Seeing a budding, runny-nosed genius in your living room is mildly delusional and probably healthy. After all, we spend so much time looking for bad in the world, isn’t it optimistic to focus on the good for a change? Unless we turn into tennis or piano parents, unless we make the child hammer out serve after serve, scale after scale, and unless we wish for other children to fail so that our little hopeful may reign, all is well.

When I regard my daughter, I am filled with wonder at her intellectual and creative abilities. To be clear: I know that any other young child would fill me with wonder, but since I do not spend hours a day with any other little girl I can only understand “children in general” as a vague abstraction. This post, however, isn’t about fatherly love. It’s a wonder-filled walk through a few poems I experienced through the eyes and budding mind of my daughter. That’s it.

Like any student of literature, I’d heard about the child-as-creative-genius again and again, particularly in undergraduate romanticism courses (children come into the world “trailing clouds of glory” and all that; then they do the same thing again in German, my other major). In the words of composer Ned Rorem: “All artists are children insofar as they proceed without blinders on, censoring every move, and when they stop being children, they stop being artists.” Before I became a father, I could repeat these theorems, but at the gut-level I didn’t really get all the fuss about kids.

Now I consider daily my daughter’s average yet fantastic quickness of mind and unfathomable creativity, and I feel daft by comparison. I feel daft because I realize, often painfully, that it is not now as it hath been of yore. I know more things than I ever did, yet my daughter shows me again and again that I’m slowing down in every way.

These intimations of mental mortality are, of course, partly Robin’s fault. Why? It was after reading one of his blog entries that I decided to guarantee my daughter a poem a night. Robin wrote something simple like, “My father used to read us a poem each night before bed…” “Good idea,” I thought. “I, too, will systematize our poetry reading.” (Because we live in Slovenia a bit of planning is required to keep the bookshelf fresh; we’ve exhausted the surprisingly large collection of English books at the local library.)

Jack Prelutsky’s The Random House Book of Poetry for Children – at $18 with shipping, or 3 cents a poem on eBay – was the obvious choice. The 572-poem anthology does not pander and Prelutsky finds room for Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, and William Blake.

The lead-off poem, appropriately for this post on childhood magic, is an excerpt from Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”:


To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

Most of the poems Prelutsky chose are good, clean rhyming silliness, poems like Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” (“Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe”) and Edward Lear’s 1871 “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat.” I can’t bring myself to cut Lear’s poem, so here’s the whole shebang:

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!’

Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?’
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

‘Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

You’ll have guessed by now that I ordered the anthology as much for myself as for my daughter. When I read to her I relive poems of my childhood.

My number one childhood poem was Dennis Lee’s “Alligator Pie.” Published in 1974, it was everywhere in my world of yore: in Ms. Gray’s grade two classroom, at home, even on the radio. Prelutsky committed no sin of omission and Lee is well-represented in The Random House Book of Poetry for Children:

Alligator pie, alligator pie,
If I don’t get some I think I’m gonna die.
Give away the green grass, give away the sky,
But don’t give away my alligator pie.

Alligator stew, alligator stew,
If I don’t get some I don’t know what I’ll do.
Give away my furry hat, give away my shoe,
But don’t give away my alligator stew.
Alligator soup, alligator soup,
If I don’t get some I think I’m gonna droop.
Give away my hockey stick, give away my hoop,
But don’t give away my alligator soup.

My daughter gets to choose the poem I should read from the Big Book and last night she pointed at “Alligator Pie.” As I was leaving her room, she spooked me by repeating much of the poem. She’d heard this poem perhaps three times in her life – and I say this with full appreciation that any child could surprise me in the same way. It is this sort of retention that makes me feel daft.

More remarkable still is the ability of a child, any child (I assume), to feel rhythms and rhymes, as if poetry were as innate as breathing.

One night my daughter was pushing for a long, long story to avoid having to go to sleep. I broke our rule-of-choice by opting for Jack Prelutsky’s “The Cow Poem.” We made a game of it: whenever I flubbed a word or line, she could stop me and make me start over.

The poem hardly deserves the label tongue-twister:

The cow mainly moos as she chooses to moo
and she chooses to moo as she chooses.
She furthermore chews as she chooses to chew
and she chooses to chew as she muses.
If she chooses to moo she may moo to amuse
or may moo just to moo as she chooses.
If she chooses to chew she may moo as she chews
or may chew just to chew as she muses.

I was insincere in my choice and game. We’d been reading for half an hour, I was slightly hoarse, and I wanted to escape to bang out a few pages of a dreary translation project. Neither of us knew the poem, and I knew for sure she didn’t know the word “muses” (because English doesn’t surround us here in Slovenia, I can usually pinpoint where she has learned a new word. “What a thundering noise!” is from Bambi; “Well, it’s not pissing anymore…” must be my fault). I would breeze through “The Cow Poem,” and she would not notice if a “muses” became a “moozes.”

I was wrong in my prediction. And serves me right for trying to put one over on a five-year-old. She spotted every error immediately, found both the poem and my gaffes hilarious, and soon we were laughing our heads off, especially when she sneezed a rhyming “achoo!” Then she got bored, and belted out impromptu nonsense verse in the same poetic form – one she’d never encountered before.

In the end, of course, she did get to sleep, and I did finish the translation. I no longer have a clue what that important translation project was, but I will remember that poetry evening for the rest of my life.

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