The joke of today’s Poem of the Day turns on the question of why English words are the way they are. In fact this isn’t a rhetorical question, as the history of the words rooster and crow makes plain.

There’s no real irony, etymologically speaking, in the fact that roosters crow and crows roost. Originally, rooster simply denoted a roosting bird. The Puritans of seventeenth-century England preferred to call the male of the Gallus gallus domesticus by this euphemism, rather than the old four-letter Anglo-Saxon appellation, which already had acquired its bawdy second meaning.

Roost, from the Middle English roste, at first denoted not the action of roosting, but the perch on which the chicken roosted. Its origin is the Old English hroste, which meant the wooden frame of a roof or attic. The word didn’t become a verb, to roost, until the early sixteenth century. It was ready and waiting, therefore, when the Puritans wished to say something that didn’t need to be redacted. It’s thanks to them that this isn’t a sexier poem than it is, but in any event, yes, roosters do, by definition, roost.

Crow, meanwhile, by which we refer to the sound the [redacted] makes, as well as to many members of the genus Corvus, derives from an Indo-European root that simply meant to crow, to shout, or to cry hoarsely. The paterfamilias of the chicken coop does, of course, shout or cry hoarsely, in his distinctive way — but then so does that upright black strutter who goes about in groups called murders. So do his cousins, all the unquietly croaking Corvidae. They don’t say [redacted]-a-doodle-doo, but according to the word’s original meaning, crows do, by definition, crow.

Furthermore, anyone who has read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little Town on the Prairie” will remember that people can eat and have eaten crow in the literal sense, as well as in the idiomatic sense of admitting to having been wrong. Presented with all these etymological and other factoids, would the witty anonymous author of this early 20th-century tetrameter poem eat crow? It looks that way. But I dunno.

To Be or Not To Be 
by Anonymous 

I sometimes think I’d rather crow 
And be a rooster than to roost 
And be a crow. But I dunno. 

A rooster he can roost also, 
Which doesn’t seem fair when crows can’t crow. 
Which may help, some. Still I dunno. 
 
Crows should be glad of one thing, though; 
Nobody thinks of eating crow, 
While roosters they are good enough 
For anyone unless they’re tough. 
 
There are lots of tough old roosters though, 
And anyway a crow can’t crow, 
So mebby roosters stand more show. 
It looks that way. But I dunno. 

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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.