Today’s Poem: I Went to the Animal Fair

Even modern verses can come from the mists of tradition, as the history of this lighter Wednesday poem shows.

Circle of Jan van Kessel the Elder, Concert of Birds, 1660–1670 (National Gallery of Art)

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I Went to the Animal Fair

by Anonymous

I went to the animal fair,
The birds and the beasts were there;
The little raccoon by the light of the moon
Was combing his auburn hair.

The monkey he got drunk,
And sat on the elephant’s trunk,
The elephant sneezed and went down on his knees,
And what became of the monk?

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As I noted last year in the New York Sun, the listing of a poem as “by Anonymous” sometimes means composed by a particular person whom we happen not to know.

But sometimes “by Anonymous” refers to no particular person. It means instead that the verses have been formed by transmission, the result of additions, fixes, and sandings-down in the retellings and reperformings down through the years.

Most nursery rhymes are “by Anonymous” in this second sense: Even where we can uncover something that looks like an origin, the recasting by word-of-mouth tradition has made the verses anonymous and even authorless.

Even modern children’s verses and nonsense songs can fit this pattern — “I Went to the Animal Fair,” for example: Today’s Poem, one of our lighter Wednesdays here at Poems Ancient and Modern. This version is from the first-known printing, in the Chicago Record newspaper in 1898, setting down what it claims are the lyrics to a nonsense song popular with American troops in Cuba during the Spanish-American War.

The source of the soldiers’ song remains unknown, but the 1898 printing at least gives us a starting point to measure the changes wrought by campfire renditions, anthology editors, and performers adding a comic moment to their sets. “The little raccoon” has typically become “the big baboon.” As the poem drifted into children’s songbooks and anthologies, “The monkey he got drunk” was judged unsuitable for the young, and so would often be changed to “The monkey fell out of his bunk” or some such.

Most contemporary versions have missed the joke of an additional unstressed syllable (in lines repeated as the transition back to the beginning in the song as a round: “What became of the monk–ey?”). Still, the trimeter and tetrameter lines — two four-line stanzas of 3-3-4-3 stresses each — beg to be sung, and the verses (usually extended with several additional stanzas) have claimed a place in the American children’s canon.

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