Dahl's Songs

This month marks Roald Dahl’s centenary, and celebrations are already afoot. Llandaff,
Wales, his birthplace, is staging a citywide performance in tribute, and this year, Oxford University Press released the Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary. Dahl is, of course, famous for his characters: Willy Wonka, Miss Trunchbull, the BFG. He’s also notorious as a character himself. He was a renowned misanthrope, infamous for his anti-Semitic comments. Tragedy marked his marriage to actress Patricia Neal: a taxicab struck their infant son, Theo; their daughter Olivia died of measles at age seven; and while Neal was pregnant with their fifth child, Lucy, in 1965, she suffered three cerebral aneurysms that left her in a coma for three weeks. Dahl helped nurse Neal back to health, but 18 years later, he divorced her and married the much younger Felicity Crosland. 

Dahl is rightly famous for his fiction, but he published several collections of poetry as well, and a Roald Dahl novel is rarely, if ever, solely in prose. As illustrator Quentin Blake, Dahl’s longtime collaborator, writes in the introduction to Vile Verses, a 2005 anthology of Dahl’s poetry, “It is hard to read one of your favourite Dahl books without soon coming across some kind of song or a piece of verse.” Characters burst into lyric, as if the story line were an elaborate song and dance to get them to the actual song and dance. Roald Dahl’s poems are almost exclusively in tetrameter couplets, a loose ballad meter well suited to his frank, pragmatic voice. Dahl’s prose is charged with poetic devices—think of Esio Trot, tortoise spelled backward, or the dyslexic title character of The Vicar of Nibbleswicke. The people and creatures may be what readers remember of Dahl, but the poetry is what makes them come alive.

It is his poetry, as embedded in his prose, that brings out the quintessence of Dahl. His early novels burst with original poems. In James and the Giant Peach, first published in 1961, the Centipede celebrates the discovery that the Peach they inhabit is edible by bursting into an extemporaneous ode to the fruit. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which first appeared in 1964, is even thicker with poems than James. The prose itself is high octane, charged with alliteration and anaphora. When Wonka takes the Golden Ticket winners on a boat ride down the Chocolate River, the parents cry out:

He’s balmy! 
He’s nutty! 
He’s batty! 
He’s dippy! 
He’s dotty! 
He’s daffy! 
He’s goofy! 
He’s beany! 
He’s buggy! 
He’s wacky! 
He’s loony!

The monometer list, full of slant rhyme, becomes incantatory. The repetition of He’s is hypnotic, a string of unstressed syllables that create a singsong effect as we read down the column. Dahl has an incredible facility for putting words in our mouths: putting this poem into the voices of the nervous parents forces readers to vocalize the adjectives too. The words all mean the same thing, and they’re all trochees; we get the sense that the shouts could go on forever. Finally, Charlie’s grandfather breaks the spell: “No, he is not!” Grandpa Joe shouts, cutting off the endlessly iterative form. 

Dahl becomes his most fantastical when poems enter the story. The Oompa-Loompas are the Greek chorus of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, providing commentary about the children in biting couplets. As the bad children are plucked off one by one, the manner of each child’s fall is sweet poetic justice, recounted even more sweetly in gleeful rhyme: just desserts, indeed. Augustus Gloop, the “great big greedy nincompoop,” is sucked into the Fudge Machine, where, the Oompa-Loompas tell us, we can be sure “that all the greed and all the gall / Is boiled away for once and all.” When Violet is turned into a giant blueberry, the Oompa-Loompas tell the cautionary tale of a Miss Bigelow, such a prodigious gum chewer that she, like “a clockwork crocodile,” eventually chews out her own tongue. Miss Bigelow is of the same world as Auden’s macabre spinster Miss Gee. Veruca Salt, the “little brute,” gets pitched down the garbage chute, descending from being spoiled rotten to living with rotten spoils. “It’s all nonsense, every bit of it!” Wonka assures the children—and us. But whether or not the poems are strictly true in content, they infuse the story with their spirit, a mix of sing songy lullaby and sheer terror. The couplets make the poems feel as though they should be soothing, though the content is anything but.

In Dahl’s collections of verse—Revolting Rhymes (1982), Dirty Beasts (1983), and Rhyme Stew (1989)—he riffs on familiar tropes from nursery rhymes and fables but gives them brutal twists. Revolting Rhymes presents updated fairy tales in which the heroes delight in skewering the villains and delivering deliciously wicked comeuppances. The chains of couplets entail that each rhyme will be met with its match, a sonic counterpart of the eye-for-an-eye code of justice that prevails. Goldilocks is presented as guilty of “crime on crime,” and justice must be served. “Myself, I think I’d rather send / Young Goldie to a sticky end,” declares Dahl. Big Bear tells Baby Bear, “Your porridge is upon the bed / But as it’s inside mademoiselle / You’ll have to eat her up as well.” In Dahl’s “Snow White,” the Dwarfs are gamblers, addicted to betting on horseraces. Instead of chastising them and helping them help themselves, as Disney’s Snow White might have done, Dahl’s heroine breaks into the palace, steals the Queen’s Magic Mirror, and takes it back to the Dwarfs, who ask it for the name of the winner of the next day’s horserace. The Mirror gives the name of the winning horse, the Dwarfs pool all their resources and bet on the horse, and they win big, providing the poem’s anti-Aesop moral: “Which shows that gambling’s not a sin / Provided that you always win.” That’s Dahl’s peculiar genius: he knows which characters need to get their comeuppance, but he also understands the delicious schadenfreude of letting heroes delight in wickedness at the expense of the bad guys. The Queen thought she’d eaten Snow White’s heart, so why shouldn’t Snow White and her fiends profit from the Queen’s prized possession? 

Dirty Beasts is the heir to Struwwelpeter, Heinrich Hoffman’s brutal and wonderful 1844 collection of nursery rhymes that skewer rotten kiddies and adults. “The Pig,” for example, presents a precocious hog who realizes that his only reason for existence is to be made into food for humans. To save himself, the pig preemptively eats up Farmer Bland first. The anaphora and exclamations make readers feel for the pig: 

“They want my bacon slice by slice 
“To sell at a tremendous price!
“They want my tender juicy chops 
“To put in all the butchers’ shops!

The pig creates a blazon to himself: he identifies all his wonderful body parts and makes himself seem like a porcine paragon, only to lament that all these excellent components are destined for the marketplace. Because the pig doesn’t want to be sliced and diced into products, he kills the farmer. It’s a Marxist justification of eating the hand that’s only feeding you to fatten you up for the slaughterhouse. (We could feel a twinge of guilt for Farmer Bland, but we don’t; after all, he’s Farmer Bland, not Farmer Grand.) 

In “The Ant-Eater,” also from Dirty Beasts, Roy, a “plump and unattractive boy” from San Francisco who wants for nothing and whines for everything, acquires an anteater. The creature scours Roy’s garden day and night but can’t find a single ant, and Roy, a budding young literalist, refuses to serve him any other form of food: “Roy shouted, ‘No! No bread or meat! / Go find some ants! They’re what you eat!” So the anteater must resort to wordplay for his supper:

Some people in the U.S.A. 
Have trouble with the words they say.
However hard they try, they can’t
Pronounce a simple word like AUNT.
Instead of AUNT, they call it ANT, 
Instead of CAN’T, they call it KANT.

Our sympathies lie with the echidna, not with the rotten kid, and we cheer at the end when the beast turns on Roy for dessert. 

Dahl is at his most poetic not strictly in the poems but in the interweaving of poetry and prose in his novels. The poems step outside to announce the author directly or to ensnare readers. Consider, for instance, the role of poems in the novel Matilda, published in 1988. Unlike James and the Giant Peach or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda is not studded with nonsense song and whimsical rhymes; other than a few ditties (“Mrs D, Mrs I, Mrs F I, Mrs C, Mrs U, Mrs L T Y”), the characters do not burst into poem or song. (This is not the same in the Broadway musical adaptation of Matilda, in which the characters do burst into frequent song.) Rather, the poems in Matilda are, for the most part, poems quoted from the outside world, not ones written by Dahl. Usually, Dahl’s novels create totalizing experiences: we are in the world that the novel creates, which is distinctly separate from our daily lives. But the poems are points that break the fourth wall. The poems from the real world that enter Matilda suggest that readers can enter this world too. 

To discover the scope of Matilda’s reading abilities, Miss Honey tests her with a poem, bringing her a “thick book” and opening it at random: 

“This is a book of humorous poetry,’ [Miss Honey] said. “See if you can read that one aloud.” 
Smoothly, without a pause and at a nice speed, Matilda began to read: 

“An epicure dining at Crewe
Found a rather large mouse in his stew.
Cried the waiter, ‘Don’t shout 
And wave it about
Or the rest will be wanting one too.’”

This anonymous limerick appears in several publications well before Matilda, such as a 1946 edition of LIFE magazine, for example, as well as several anthologies of children’s poetry. But Miss Honey’s use of the specific adjective humorous cues us that her “thick book” is likely A Century of Humorous Verse, 1850–1950, edited by Roger Lancelyn Green. Green, who wrote many children’s books and beloved retellings of myths, was perhaps most famous as part of the Inklings, the legendary Oxonian discussion circle that included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien among its core members. 

Though Green is never mentioned by name, his shadow presence in the classroom evokes the Inklings: a whiff of The Eagle and Child, the pub where the Inklings convened, wafts into Miss Honey’s classroom. When Miss Honey asks Matilda about other books that she’s read, Matilda volunteers that she likes C.S. Lewis, though she critiques both Mr. Lewis and Mr. Tolkien for their lack of “funny bits.” Matilda and Miss Honey become a sort of counterpart to the Inklings, a feminist revision of the boys’ club.

The Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary gives two definitions of funny: something that “makes you laugh or smile” and something that is “strange or surprising.” “Funny bits” are at the center of Matilda but not always amusing. The book chronicles Matilda’s fall from innocence and gain of self-knowledge, and funny shifts from the first to the second definition over the course of the novel. 

Of course, Dahl has already bested Messrs. Lewis and Tolkien: Matilda implicitly offers a corrective to the literary criticism that Matilda explicitly voices to Miss Honey. The beginning of Matilda chronicles her pranks against her father, such as replacing his hair tonic with her mother’s hair dye. Matilda begins the story as a trickster figure, a Brer Rabbit or Reynard the Fox who survives in a hostile environment by outmaneuvering her oppressors. 

It’s no accident that Miss Honey rhymes with funny. Dahl ascribes to a Dickensian theory of names. (Dahl loves Dickens, and the highest compliment he can pay himself is when the BFG names his favorite author as “Dahl’s Chickens”: both Charles Dickens and Dahl himself.) When someone named Aunt Spiker or Mr. Wormwood or Gizzardgulper appears, we’re on our guard; when we meet Miss Honey, we know we’re in sweet hands. 

It’s also no accident that the shift in the book from funny-amusing to funny-strange occurs through a poem. When Matilda visits Miss Honey’s house, Miss Honey recites the first stanza of “In Country Sleep,” Dylan Thomas’s long, romantic poem about childhood and loss in the British countryside. Over the course of the poem, the “girl” in the first stanza becomes a medley of all fairy-tale heroines: she is Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, any pure girl threatened by the encroaching evils of the outside world. The poem describes the lush, enchanted world as a beautiful garden, a place where the heroine remains safe. But this Eden is also a prison. “Sleep, good, for ever, slow and deep, spelled rare and wise” begins the second stanza: though the lovely woods may seem to be a haven protecting the girl from outside evils, the speaker also spins a magic spell around the heroine, keeping her permanently within the enchanted woods. No one will come “to court the honeyed heart from your side before sunrise,” the speaker assuages the girl, but it is unclear whether the reassurance is a promise or a threat. Is the speaker a parent lulling a child to sleep? Or is the speaker the witch in Rapunzel, keeping the princess locked in the tower, insulated from evil but isolated from good?

Dahl is extremely good at creating characters and plots that keep us moving lickety-split through the fantastical, the weird, the terrifying. But when Dahl wants us to get up close and personal with emotions—shock, disgust, glee, terror, triumph—he turns to poetry as a means of directly accessing the senses. Through poetry, Dahl gets under our skin.