Why does purr rhyme with fur?
— How human of you to ask!
Simply because we cats prefer
petting us to be your main task.
***
Morgenstern’s Gallowsong led me to Edward Lear and then even, God forbid, to T.S. Eliot. Suddenly popped out of my mind this feline trifle.
The contents of the 1938 edition of The Oxford Book of Light Verse which I ended up pulling off my shelves in that quest were selected by W.H. Auden, still in his crypto-Marxist phase, so he opined:
“When the things in which the poet is interested, the things which he sees about him, are much the same of those of his audience, and that audience is a fairly general one, he will not be conscious of himself as an unusual person, and his language will be straightforward and close to ordinary speech. When, on the other hand, his interests and perceptions are not readily acceptable to society, or his audience is a highly specialized one, perhaps of his fellow poets, he will be acutely aware of himself as the poet, and his method of expression may depart very widely from the normal social language. In the first case his poetry will be light”.
A rather humorless description of what cannot float without humor.