Poem of the Day: ‘How Doth the Little Crocodile’
Lewis Carroll’s parody of Isaac Watts’s poem replaces the goody-goody bee with the crocodile, whose virtue resides in his being exactly no more and no less than what he is.
In Chapter Five of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) causes his young heroine to be catechized by a hookah-smoking blue caterpillar who demands, among other things, that she recite a moral poem. The poem in question is Isaac Watts’s 1715 “Against Idleness and Mischief,” which gives us the image of the virtuous bee who does not simply do the things that bees are hardwired to do to ensure their survival as a species, but does them to be good. Dutifully, because she does want to be good herself, Alice attempts to recite the poem. What comes out instead, to her bewilderment and chagrin, is today’s Poem of the Day selection, “How Doth the Little Crocodile.” This parody of Watts’s poem, in two hymn-meter abab quatrains, replaces the goody-goody bee with the crocodile, whose virtue resides in his being exactly no more and no less than what he is.
How Doth the Little Crocodile
by Lewis Carroll
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!
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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
