Today’s Poem: The Duel

Eugene Field: not that sweet

Celia Smith, patent image for the “Ithaca Kitty” toy, 1892 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Duel

by Eugene Field

The gingham dog and the calico cat
Side by side on the table sat;
’Twas half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)
Nor one nor t’other had slept a wink!
The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate
Appeared to know as sure as fate
There was going to be a terrible spat.
     (I wasn’t there; I simply state
     What was told to me by the Chinese plate!)

The gingham dog went “bow-wow-wow!”
And the calico cat replied “mee-ow!”
The air was littered, an hour or so,
With bits of gingham and calico,
While the old Dutch clock in the chimney-place
Up with its hands before its face,
For it always dreaded a family row!
     (Now mind: I’m only telling you
     What the old Dutch clock declares is true!)

The Chinese plate looked very blue,
And wailed, “Oh, dear! what shall we do!”
But the gingham dog and the calico cat
Wallowed this way and tumbled that,
Employing every tooth and claw
In the awfullest way you ever saw —
And, oh! how the gingham and calico flew!
     (Don’t fancy I exaggerate!
     I got my views from the Chinese plate!)

Next morning where the two had sat
They found no trace of the dog or cat;
And some folks think unto this day
That burglars stole the pair away!
But the truth about the cat and the pup
Is this: They ate each other up!
Now what do you really think of that!
     (The old Dutch clock it told me so,
     And that is how I came to know.)
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Eugene Field (1850–1895), all his life a Midwestern newspaperman, excelled at satirical feature writing. But today we remember him chiefly for his children’s poems — at least, a handful of them, some of which, such as “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod” and “Little Boy Blue,” both written at the end of the 1880s, are so un-satirical that they might almost have been written by a different person.

But then, Field seems to have been strangely ambivalent about children. His biographer at the Poetry Foundation notes that he

had the reputation of making faces at, or otherwise teasing, small children when he thought he was unobserved by adults. Slason Thompson, Field's early biographer, suggests that Field did not like children, but Charles Dennis, writing later, believes that Field had an attitude of one child to another; Dennis further argues that Field went through a “sweetening process” which made his later works gentler and more sentimental than this early, satiric work.

But the theory of a late “sweetening” balks at the hurdle of Field’s “The Duel,” a strange and distinctly un-sweet poem about toys, written in the last three years of its author’s life. Although “The Duel” has an obvious precedent in the old limerick about the Cats of Kilkenny, according to Field his calico cat was inspired by a popular stuffed toy called the “Ithaca Kitty,” which made its first appearance in 1892. With “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,” but not “Little Boy Blue,” “The Duel” appears in the 1904 Poems Every Child Should Know, edited by Mary E. Burt.

In a brief preface to this poem, Burt writes, “In making such a collection as this it is not easy to find poems at once delicate, witty, and graphic . . . I have taught ‘The Duel’ hundreds of times, and children invariably love it.” The poem, with its outrageous premise — nature red in gingham and calico — achieves its comic effect by approximating the conventions of Greek tragedy.

Eugene Field, 1896

As in Greek tragedy, the actual carnage is hinted at but isn’t “graphic” in the usual sense, because it occurs offstage. It’s “delicate,” as Mary Burt observes, in obscuring the actual violence, yet there’s also something comically “graphic” in the way that an imagined fight between stuffed animals attains the same order of magnitude as, say, the murder of Agamemnon, albeit in a gossipy secondhand way. As in Greek tragedy, too, this drama has a chorus: the old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate, who are the source of the whole story.

Additionally, even the form is funny and surprising. Tetrameter couplets are the comic gold standard, but this poem varies that formula in stanzas of nine lines, rather than a number divisible by two. In each stanza, the seemingly odd line out, line 7, picks up the a rhyme, always in a word signifying the escalation of discord.

These sweet little soft toys have been fated to devour each other, and so, apparently, they do. At any rate, they mysteriously vanish, leaving nothing but scraps on the table. And only the Dutch clock and the Chinese plate are left to tell.

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