Learn about Poetry & Literature: PARODY

Hello. I'm Gill at EngVid, and today we're looking at a couple of poems, and they are

connected in a way because the one on the right is what's known as a parody of the one

on the left. So, what is a parody? Okay. So, the one on the left was written at a certain

date, this one, 1715, and the one on the right was, well, written/published in 1865, so more

than 100 years later. So, you have to have the first one, the first poem for somebody

to write a parody of it, because the idea is that this later poem is making fun in some

way of the earlier poem, and it's kind of imitating the style, and it's echoing some

of the words, but the effect of it is very different. Okay? So, this one is meant to

be quite serious, but this one is quite funny because it's making fun of something serious.

Okay? It'll become clearer as we start to look at it. So, I'll start by just reading

the one on the left, and then we'll... I'll explain it a little bit. So, this is by Isaac

Watts in a book called Divine Songs for Children, published in 1715. Okay. So, it reads. "How

doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour, and gather honey all the day from every

opening flower? How skilfully she builds her cell, how neat she spreads her wax, and labours

hard to store it well with the sweet food she makes." Okay. So, the original actually

has another two verses after this, but because this later parody of it is only in two verses,

I've only put these first two verses on the board because these are directly connected.

Okay. So, Isaac Watts was a religious man, a clergyman, and he was trying to instruct

children in good behaviour and not wasting time, because the idea is if you have a lot

of time and you don't do anything useful with it, you'll start doing bad things. So, keep

busy and do good things. So, he's using the busy bee as an example of something in nature,

an insect in nature, who always seems to be busy and working and producing something useful,

something good, because the bees are producing honey, and they seem to be working all the

time, going out to find the flowers and the pollen, bringing it back to the beehive and

working inside the beehive and creating honey. Okay. So, "How doth the little busy bee improve

each shining hour?" So, the idea that an hour of time is a shining hour, it's something

very positive. Don't waste an hour when you could be doing something with it, something

special. You've got to improve each shining hour. You've got to do something with it.

And "Gather honey all the day from every opening flower." So, this bee is flying around all

day in the garden collecting honey or collecting the pollen that's going to make the honey from

every opening flower, so this would be in the summer. "How skillfully she builds her cell."

So, this is the... Inside the beehive, the little compartments that you get where the honey is

formed, she builds her cell. She's doing something, building. She's been out collecting, now she's

back, she's doing some building. "How neat she spreads her wax." That's the bee's wax inside

the hive. "And labors hard", she's working hard, "to store it well." The hive is where the honey

is stored with the sweet food she makes. It's almost like the bee is working in a factory,

you know, and making something, being very productive. So, this is kind of praising the bee

for being such a good little worker. So, this religious man is teaching children, you know,

when they grow up, and even as their children, they're not going to get away with any

time-wasting. You know, they've got to be productive even as children. Maybe read lots of

books, do useful things, you know, don't get into trouble, don't be lazy, all that sort of thing.

So, it's a very moral kind of verse, really. So, strangely enough, Lewis Carroll was also a

religious man, clergyman. It wasn't his real name, but the person, you know, Dodgson, his real name

was Charles Dodgson. He was also a clergyman, but I think he had more of a sense of humor,

and he was writing this to entertain a little girl that he knew. The whole book, Alice's Adventures

in Wonderland, came from telling this little girl, Alice, stories and entertaining her,

and there's nothing moralistic about the parody. So, we've got instead of the bee,

we've got "How doth the little crocodile", so that's quite a different kind of

natural creature in nature. "How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail?"

So, what we've got, we've got some echoes. We've got "How doth the little",

"How doth the little" is all the same, but then instead of "busy bee", we have "crocodile".

It's still three syllables, "busy bee", "crocodile", so Lewis Carroll is following the rhythm

right from the start, and also echoing the words. So, instead of "improve each shining hour",

we've got "improve his shining tail". Okay. So, again, we've got "improve" and "shining",

and the rhythm is still the same. "Improve each shining hour", "improve his shining tail". Okay.

"And gather honey all the day", "and", so we've got "and" again, and... But we've got "and pour

the waters of the Nile", because where would you get a crocodile? Where would you see a crocodile?

And what could rhyme with "crocodile"? Nile, the River Nile in Egypt, where there are crocodiles,

so that was a convenient rhyme. So, that's interesting because we've got a rhyme there,

but "bee" and "day" don't rhyme, so that's an interesting difference. But it makes it funnier,

really. I think if you get a rhyme, it actually sometimes creates humour, and he's wanting to

be funny and make people laugh. So, "How doth the little crocodile improve his shining tail,

and pour the waters of the Nile on every golden scale?" You know, the skin of the

crocodile is very rough with sort of scales on it. So, we've got "every", "every",

so that's an echo and the rhythm. "From every opening flower on every golden scale",

so it all matches in the rhythm. Okay. And then we've got "How skillfully", so we've got here

"How cheerfully", and then we've got "She and he builds her cell. He seems to grin." Ooh,

so he's grinning because the mouth of a crocodile with all those teeth

looks as if they're grinning. So, again, that adds to the humour.

"How neat she spreads her wax." We've got "How... How neatly spreads", is still the same word,

which is clever, because this is about spreading wax, beeswax spreading. But this one,

"How neatly spreads his claws", so he's spreading his claws like this

for some purpose. Okay, so we've got "her" and "his". Okay.

"And labour's hard to store it well." So, we've got "and" again. "And welcomes little fishers

in", so we've got the same rhythm here, but the words are mostly different. "Labour's hard to

store it well, and welcomes little fishers in", meaning little fishers into his mouth

with the crocodile with grinning, and fishers are swimming into his mouth,

not realising where they're going, probably. "With the sweet food she makes",

so we've got "with gently smiling jaws". So, again, we've got... We've got "grin" and "in" is

a rhyme. Oh, "tail" and "scale" is a rhyme. And "claws" and "jaws", that's... We've got a very

nice rhyme scheme here. A-B-A-B-C-D-C-D, so a nice alternating rhyme pattern. But here we've got

"be our day flower", so okay, good, we've got a rhyme there. "Sell, wax, well, make", so "sell"

and "well", and then "wax" and "makes", I'd call that a half rhyme because we've got that "wax"

sounds like "ks", and here we've got "ks", so that's a half rhyme, but it's a kind of almost

rhyme. So there's a bit of rhyming in this one, but not very obvious. But here we've got a very

regular rhyme scheme, and I think if you get very regular rhyming, it often makes it sound very

funny. It's very mechanical sounding. So... And the picture is very different here because we've got

not a bee making, you know, using its time usefully to make lovely honey.

We've got here a crocodile which is going to eat other animals or fish. It's going to swallow the

fish, so it's more cruel and predatory and dangerous. So, Lewis Carroll has totally overturned

the lovely, nice picture here of the bee working hard, and here we have a crocodile that's just

sitting there swallowing little fishes without those poor fishes even realizing what's happening

to them. So that's what a parody does, really. It makes fun of maybe something more serious,

and the fact that... I mean, when I... When I was very young and first read this, I didn't know

this one, so I just read this and thought, "Oh, that's funny." But when... When you know the

original that it's based on, that it's been influenced by, it then makes it even funnier,

I think, because you realize then it's an echo of it, and it's maybe overturning the idea and

making something different out of it and creating humor at the same time. So... Okay, so I hope that's

been a useful example for you of what it is to do a parody. It's a very clever, skillful thing to

do, really. It's not easy, I don't think, but maybe you could try. If you feel like parodying

something, have a go and see... See what comes out of it. Okay, so thank you for listening,

and I hope to see you again soon. Bye for now.