Today’s Poem: Ode to an Expiring Frog

Mrs. Leo Hunter’s most acclaimed work, channeled by Charles Dickens

Sir Edwin Landseer, Study of a Frog, c. 1850 (Victoria and Albert Museum)

Ode to an Expiring Frog

by Charles Dickens

Can I view thee panting, lying
On thy stomach, without sighing;
Can I unmoved see thee dying
On a log,
Expiring frog!

Say have fiends in shape of boys
With wild halloo, and brutal noise
Hunted thee from marshy joys,
With a dog,
Expiring frog!

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It’s there in Chapter 15 of The Pickwick Papers that Mr. Leo Hunter makes an appearance. After the excitements of the election in Eatanswill, Mr. Pickwick and his friends are recuperating with a pleasant stay at an inn called the Peacock, and Mr. Leo Hunter sends in his card to invite the distinguished company to a literary breakfast with none other than Mr. Leo Hunter’s wife, the Mrs. Leo Hunter:

“To-morrow morning, sir, we give a public breakfast—a FETE CHAMPETRE—to a great number of those who have rendered themselves celebrated by their works and talents. . . . Mrs. Leo Hunter has many of these breakfasts, Sir, . . . ‘feasts of reason,’ sir, ‘and flows of soul,’ as somebody who wrote a sonnet to Mrs. Leo Hunter on her breakfasts, feelingly and originally observed.”

We learn that Mrs. Leo Hunter “dotes on poetry, sir. She adores it; I may say that her whole soul and mind are wound up, and entwined with it.”

“She has produced some delightful pieces, herself, sir. You may have met with her ‘Ode to an Expiring Frog,’ sir.” 

“I don’t think I have,” said Mr. Pickwick. 

“You astonish me, Sir,” said Mr. Leo Hunter. “It created an immense sensation. It was signed with an ‘L’ and eight stars, and appeared originally in a lady’s magazine. It commenced — ‘Can I view thee panting, lying / On thy stomach, without sighing; / Can I unmoved see thee dying / On a log / Expiring frog!’”

“Beautiful!” said Mr. Pickwick. 

“Fine,” said Mr. Leo Hunter; “so simple.”

“Very,” said Mr. Pickwick. 

The lost portrait of Dickens in 1843 (Wikimedia Commons)

We can forget what stardom was brought to the author by the serialized 1836–1837 book, his first novel. Charles Dickens (1812–1870) was a sensation of a kind that was foreshadowed only by the succès de scandale of Lord Byron and not matched again until the Beatles. Hired as a talented young hack to write the text for illustrations by the more famous illustrator Robert Seymour (1798–1836), Dickens soon made the text the point of the rollicking story. And made himself the most popular writer in the English-speaking world.

We can also forget how much poetry was thought to be a component of the work of writers. Unlike many Victorian novelists, however, Dickens wrote little verse. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) left behind a thick volume of poetry in his collected works. In a later generation, Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was a major poet. But a 1903 collection of Dickens’s “poems and verses” managed to find only 35 entries among his juvenilia and various burstings into song in his books — although, curiously, that doesn’t include Today’s Poem, “Ode to an Expiring Frog,” Mrs. Leo Hunter’s heartfelt effusion.

Dickens’s best verse is probably “The Ivy Green,” from Chapter 6 of The Pickwick Papers, but here, for one of our lighter Wednesdays, why not his most memorable voicing of cringeworthy literary pretension? “Can I unmoved see thee dying / On a log, / Expiring frog!”

Phiz’s engraving of “Mrs. Leo Hunter’s Fancy-Dress Déjeunė” (Wikimedia Commons)

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