Today’s Poem: Rice Pudding
The boneheaded grownup and the mystery of what’s the matter with Mary Jane
Rice Pudding
by A.A. Milne
What is the matter with Mary Jane? She’s crying with all her might and main, And she won’t eat her dinner — rice pudding again — What is the matter with Mary Jane? What is the matter with Mary Jane? I’ve promised her dolls and a daisy-chain, And a book about animals — all in vain — What is the matter with Mary Jane? What is the matter with Mary Jane? She’s perfectly well, and she hasn’t a pain; But, look at her, now she’s beginning again! — What is the matter with Mary Jane? What is the matter with Mary Jane? I’ve promised her sweets and a ride in the train, And I’ve begged her to stop for a bit and explain — What is the matter with Mary Jane? What is the matter with Mary Jane? She’s perfectly well and she hasn’t a pain, And it’s lovely rice pudding for dinner again! What is the matter with Mary Jane? ═══════════════════════════════════
Maybe it’s A.A. Milne (1882–1956) we have to blame for the trope, persistent and annoying, of the Grownup Who Doesn’t Get It. You know this grownup. You’ve seen him on television (generally it is the paterfamilias), bumbling around the sitcom living room, while his children engage in what we might politely call the “smart remark.”
But the great nineteenth-century English novelists — Jane Austen, for example, or Charles Dickens — were already masters at showing us the hapless grownup. Austen’s fictional mothers hardly need their children to make them look foolish. The great triumph of Dickens’s Jellyby children, in Bleak House, is that they survive their mother’s enthusiasm for the far-removed children of Boorioboola-gha.
So on second thought, it can’t be all A.A. Milne’s fault. Maybe, in truth, it’s nobody’s fault at all, but simply the way the world, for some impenetrable reason, has decided to work.
Still, consider Milne’s famous Winnie-the-Pooh stories. In those stories, the one truly wise character, the character everyone else consults in every crisis, is a six-year-old boy. In the Hundred-Acre Wood, human grownups aren’t merely irrelevant; they’re completely absent. Even Kanga, a moderately un-stupid mother, worries too much but defers to Christopher Robin’s clear head when Roo goes missing. And in Milne’s poem “Disobedience,” Poems Ancient and Modern readers have already met James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree, whose mother can’t find her featherbrained way to the end of the town without the protection and guidance of her three-year-old.
Children naturally find this kind of thing very funny. Sometimes it’s only children who find this kind of thing very funny. But what impels children to listen over and over and over to poems from Milne’s 1924 When We Were Very Young is the same thing that makes even sensible grownups consent to read them aloud. These poems do far more than simply push that button of the child’s desire to delight in getting one over on the adults.
In “Disobedience,” for example, the precise Latin hexameters give the tale of James and his mother its irresistible bounce, even while they are an echo of something more elevated. That frisson of dissonance extends the joke. In today’s Poem of the Day, in which the adult speaker can’t figure out why Mary Jane is kicking and screaming, the humor is similarly twofold and embedded in its form.
Of course, the one possibility this clueless adult fails to think of — I’ve tried Reasoning! Pleading! — is that maybe, just maybe, the presence of rice pudding at dinner day after day is itself the problem. It’s no accident that the end-word again recurs in every other stanza, accruing meaning with each repetition. And the joke is extended by Milne’s sophisticatedly simple poetic technique: tetrameter lines that bring around the same end-rhyme, over and over and over, relentlessly going nowhere like the rice pudding, and like trying to find out what’s wrong with Mary Jane.
Oh happy memory. When I was very young, I loved this book and the illustrations. That bent stubborn head and the flying shoe - funny then and once you grow up to become that clueless mother, funny again.
E.H. Shepard’s illustrations enhance Mr. Milne’s poems and prose. Thank you for including the illustration with this post.
I am so glad that I was introduced to Winnie-the-Pooh as a child. The rhythm, repetition, meaning, and of course the accompanying illustrations engage the reader no matter our age. Your explanation of the poem’s structure makes our enjoyment more robust. Halfway Down is another favorite example.