Can we talk about Dr. Seuss?

The first book I remember picking up as a child was a thin orange hardcover book with a cat wearing a ridiculously big hat bent over with a worried expression on its face looking at green eggs and ham. I flipped through the pages, and I remember catching how words rhymed at the end of sentences. This was the first tangible example of poetry that I remember discovering and, along with the illustrations in the book, made a lot of sense and was fun to read. 

Theodor Seuss Geisel took the pen name, Dr. Seuss, to hide his identity, because of a disciplinary incident, while writing for a magazine as a student at Dartmouth College. He wrote rhythmic rhymes as part of his poetic meter, which is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines of a verse. A verse is a single line but can be grouped into lines called stanzas. 

For example, here is a stanza, from Green Eggs and Ham, consisting of four lines (quatrain) which rhymes, making it a rhyming heroic stanza (sort of):

Would you like them
in a house?
Would you like them
with a mouse?

In his poetry, Dr. Seuss used simple words and played with them, sometimes repeating them in a lyrical form. This is where his genius comes in. The above quatrain could be described as a heroic stanza where every other second line rhymes: ABAB, however, because the word “them” is used to rhyme with itself, this has elements of a “monorhyme”. In fact, the entire story of Green Eggs and Ham has elements of a monorhyme with the line – Sam-I-am, repeatedly being used throughout the poem. Four-line stanzas become nine line or two-line stanzas, and rhyming schemes are changed again. 

It’s clear that he chose his words carefully to make or emphasize a point; while making it look basic, because I can still recite them over forty years later and I can still remember the lessons in his poems. For example, in Green Eggs and Ham, Sam refuses to change his belief that he does not like green eggs and ham despite never trying them and being given ample opportunity to do so, including – on a boat, with a goat, in the rain or on a train! Finally, after many attempts, he tries them and likes them, he is even thankful for trying them in the end. 

In real life (not being cats with hats), you can substitute green eggs and ham with anything that is unpleasant, unappealing or even threatening to your beliefs. What you think you might not like can change at a particular time, all you must do, is give it a try. In the event that you do not, the logical conclusion would be that at least you have clarity, and your objection is based on experience rather than emotion. There are limits to this of course, in the event of life-threatening situations, but because Dr. Seuss uses such basic examples, like breakfast food, it can be applied to almost any situation. 

The life lessons that Dr. Seuss taught us using simple words shows how complex his writing is. It’s easy to use three and four syllable words to make your poems as complex as possible and lose the reader along the way. Try doing that with a cat in a hat! Dr. Seuss was a brilliant writer and although I write in a different style, I did write one poem in his honour in my book, The Greyness of Good, as a thank you for the gift of my being the first poem I read in my life and for opening a new world of imagination:

Homage to Dr. Seuss

By Ramiro Mora

We were out
And we saw him
Lying in the woods
We were out
And we saw him
Not doing what bats should

Can you stand up on your own?
Can you stand up on this stone?
Should we touch your crooked wing?
Should we touch that dastardly thing?

But touch we did and brought him home
To help him heal that broken bone
And in a sling he sat for a week
Looking slightly in pain but also quite chic

We fed him through a tiny straw
And gave him our necks for him to gnaw
And slowly better did he get
His little nose became increasingly wet

Until it was time to say good-bye
I told him that it was his time to fly

Go gently dear friend
There is no time for maybes
Go gently dear friend
I think I have rabies