THE Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat;
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above
And sang to a small guitar,
‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!’
Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl,
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?’
They sailed away, for a year and a day
To the land where the Bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.
‘Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ has featured in countless books and been illustrated hundreds of times since its original appearance in Edward Lear’s Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets, published in 1871. Lear (1812-88) was a noted author of nonsense verse and credited with popularizing the art of the limerick. ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ was written in 1867 and presented as a gift to the children of his patron and benefactor Edward Stanley, the 13th Earl of Derby. This led to rumours that the real author was the earl himself as many believed Derby was using his first name, Edward, plus an anagram of the word ‘earl’ as a pen name.
The poem is notable for introducing the word runcible into the English language. Indeed, during the 1920s, nearly four decades after the poet’s death, some dictionaries began defining the word as a small, three-pronged pickle fork, curved like a spoon and otherwise known as a ‘spork’. But this does not describe the spoon featured in the original illustration of Lear’s poem nor, for that matter, the one in his illustration of the ‘Dolomphious Duck’ in which the runcible utensil, while big enough to hold a frog, is quite clearly a spoon and not a fork. In fact, lexicographers of the 1920s appear to have completely missed Lear’s references to the word in other poems, such as a ‘runcible cat’, ‘runcible hat’, ‘runcible goose’ and ‘runcible wall’. None of which could possibly have anything to do with the three-pronged spork. Clearly Lear made the word up for his own amusement and for the entertainment of others and yet it sparked off a hunt for the meaning lasting several decades. I’d like to suggest that if any linguistic explorers are still looking for the Bong-tree and a ring-wearing Piggy-wig they should stop right now.