Maybe it’s A.A. Milne (1882–1956) we have to blame for the trope, persistent and annoying, of the Grownup Who Doesn’t Get It. You know this grownup. You’ve seen him on television (generally it’s the paterfamilias) bumbling around the sitcom living room while his children engage in what we might politely call the “smart remark.” But the great nineteenth-century English novelists — Jane Austen, for example, or Charles Dickens — were already masters at showing us the hapless grownup. Austen’s fictional mothers hardly need their children to make them look foolish. The great triumph of Dickens’s Jellyby children, in “Bleak House,” is that they survive their mother’s enthusiasm for the far-removed children of Boorioboola-gha. So on second thought, it can’t be all Milne’s fault. Maybe, in truth, it’s nobody’s fault at all, but simply the way the world, for some impenetrable reason, has decided to work right now. Still, consider Milne’s famous Winnie-the-Pooh stories, the ones that induced last Tuesday’s Poet of the Day, Dorothy Parker (indisputably a grownup), to put the sentence, “Tonstant Weader fwowed up,” in her review of Milne’s work. In those stories, the one truly wise character, the character everyone else consults in every crisis, is a six-year-old boy. And in Milne’s poem “Disobedience,” Sun readers have already met James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree, whose mother can’t find her featherbrained way to the end of the town without the protection and guidance of her three-year-old.Children naturally find this kind of thing very funny. Sometimes it’s only children who find this kind of thing very funny. But what impels children to listen over and over and over to poems from Milne’s 1924 “When We Were Very Young” is the same thing that makes even sensible grownups consent to read them aloud. These poems do far more than simply push that button of the child’s desire to delight in getting one over on the adults. In “Disobedience,” for example, the precise Latin hexameters give the tale of James and his mother its irresistible bounce, even while they are an echo of something more elevated. That frisson of dissonance extends the joke. In today’s Poem of the Day, in which the adult speaker can’t figure out why Mary Jane is kicking and screaming, the humor is similarly twofold and embedded in its form. First, of course, the one possibility this adult fails to think of — I’ve tried Reasoning! Pleading! — is that maybe the presence of rice pudding at dinner day after day is itself the problem. Yet the joke is extended by Milne’s sophisticated poetic technique: tetrameter lines that bring around a repeated end-rhyme, relentlessly going nowhere, like trying to find out what’s wrong with Mary Jane. Rice Puddingby A. A. MilneWhat is the matter with Mary Jane?She’s crying with all her might and main,And she won’t eat her dinner — rice pudding again –What is the matter with Mary Jane?What is the matter with Mary Jane?I’ve promised her dolls and a daisy-chain,And a book about animals — all in vain —What is the matter with Mary Jane?What is the matter with Mary Jane?She’s perfectly well, and she hasn’t a pain;But, look at her, now she’s beginning again! —What is the matter with Mary Jane?What is the matter with Mary Jane?I’ve promised her sweets and a ride in the train,And I’ve begged her to stop for a bit and explain —What is the matter with Mary Jane?What is the matter with Mary Jane?She’s perfectly well and she hasn’t a pain,And it’s lovely rice pudding for dinner again!What is the matter with Mary Jane?___________________________________________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 are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.
