(Poem #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.
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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 #903, Leviathan -- Anon. More Spike Milligan: Poem #701, Teeth Poem #831, The Soldiers at Lauro Poem #1044, Contagion Poem #1196, The ABC Poem #1207, Hamlet
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