[1554] Look at all those monkeys

Look at all those monkeys
Jumping in their cage.
Why don't they all go out to work
And earn a decent wage?

    How can you say such silly things,
    And you a son of mine?
    Imagine monkeys travelling on
    The Morden-Edgware line!

But what about the Pekinese!
They have an allocation.
'Don't travel during Peke hour',
It says on every station.

    My Gosh, you're right, my clever boy,
    I never thought of that!
    And so they left the monkey house,
    While an elephant raised his hat.

	-- Spike Milligan

Anyone can produce doggerel, but it's incredibly difficult to write _good_
meaningless verse, the kind that stays in your mind for more than an instant
after your first reading. Spike Milligan manages to do so all the time. His
poems are, if anything, even more whimsical and surreal than those by (say)
Nash or Belloc [1], but there's a bizarre internal logic, a lunatic
consistency, that elevates them to another level entirely.

thomas.

[1] Though I'll admit they fall well short of anything by Lewis Carroll;
there's just no trumping the Master.

[Minstrels Links]

Monkeys:
Poem #1319, Goats and Monkeys -- Derek Walcott
Poem #1483, An Infinite Number of Monkeys -- Ronald Koertge

Elephants:
Poem #1178, Mmenson -- Edward Kamau Braithwaite
Poem #1179, The Blind Men and the Elephant -- John Godfrey Saxe

Hippopopopopotami:
Poem #124, The Hippopotamus  -- Hilaire Belloc
Poem #844, The Hippopotamus -- Oliver Herford
Poem #845, Recipe for a Hippopotamus Sandwich -- Shel Silverstein
Poem #846, The Hippopotamus -- T. S. Eliot
Poem #847, On the Death of Smet-Smet, the Hippopotamus-Goddess -- Rupert
Brooke
Poem #848, The Hippopotamus -- Ogden Nash

Other Large Animals:
Poem #120, The Purple Cow  -- Gelett Burgess
Poem #215, The Loch Ness Monster's Song  -- Edwin Morgan
Poem #775, The Maldive Shark -- Herman Melville
Poem #896, The Kraken -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Poem #854, Very Like a Whale -- Ogden Nash
Poem #902, Leviathan -- Anon.

More Spike Milligan:
Poem #701, Teeth
Poem #831, The Soldiers at Lauro
Poem #1044, Contagion
Poem #1196, The ABC
Poem #1207, Hamlet

[this poem is archived, accessible and awaiting your comments at]
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1554.html
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