Hello and welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, also known as Lewis Carroll. He was born in 1832 in England, and he died in 1898.

He is probably best known to most of you as the author of Alice's

Adventures in Wonderland and then the follow-up book through The Looking Glass and what happened there,

but he is also a great poet, a very interesting poet, a very fun poet. This week what I've been doing

is popping open the collection that Harold Bloom edited, called The Best Poems of the English

Language. Bloom died last week, so it seemed a fitting way to choose the poems for this week.

And the poem that I opened to today is Lewis Carroll's The Mad Gardener's song. So I'll get right

to that, offer a few comments with a little help from Bloom, and then read it one more time.

It goes like this. He thought he saw an elephant that practiced on a fife. He looked again and found it was a

letter from his wife. At length I realize, he said, the bitterness of life. He thought he saw buffalo upon the chimney piece.

He looked again and found it was his sister's husband's niece.

Unless you leave this house, he said, I'll send for the police.

He thought he saw Rattlesnake that questioned him in Greek.

He looked again and found it was the middle of next week.

The one thing I regret, he said, is that it cannot speak.

He thought he saw a banker's clerk descending from the bus.

He looked again and found it was a hippopotamus.

If this should stay to dine, he said, there won't be much for us.

He thought he saw a kangaroo that worked a coffee mill.

He looked again and found it was a vegetable pill.

"'Were I to swallow this,' he said,

...