Oliver Herford's "The Platypus"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2024

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Oliver Herford (2 December 1860 – 5 July 1935), regarded as “the American Oscar Wilde,” was an Anglo-American writer, artist, and illustrator known for his pithy bon mots and skewed sense of humor. His obituary in The New York Times nicely sums up his unique brilliance:

"His wit…was too original at first to go down with the very delectable highly respectable magazine editors of the Nineties. It was odd, unexpected, his own brand. It takes genius to write the best nonsense, which is often far more sensible than sense. Herford's, the result of care and polish, looked unforced.…Intelligent, thoughtful, well-bred, what with his animals and his children and his artistic simplicities, he was remote from the style of the best moderns. No violence, no obscenity, not even obscurity or that long-windedness which is the signet of the illustrious writer of today. An old-fashioned gentleman, a painstaking artist, whose work had edge, grace and distinction."

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.2	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, August 1st, 2024.
0:10.2	Today's poem is by Oliver Hereford, and it's called The Platypus.
0:15.2	I'll read it once, say a few words, and read it one more time.
0:20.2	The Platypus.
0:22.9	My child, the duck-billed platypus, a sad example sets for us.
0:28.9	From him we learn how indecision of character provokes derision.
0:33.6	This vacillating thing, you see, could not decide which he would be, fish, flesh, or fowl, and chose all three.
0:43.1	The scientists were sorely vexed to classify him, so perplexed their brains that they, with a rage at bay, called him a horrid name one day, a name that baffles, frs, and shocks us, ornithorincus, paradoxus.
1:01.2	Believe it or not, I got that last line on the first try.
1:06.1	This is one of those just-so stories, the kind of beast fable about how a particular animal came to look a certain way or be a certain way, and that is usually a moral attached.
1:23.1	This one seems very apt for our own day, tongue and cheek as it is.
1:28.2	The platypus is a bizarre amalgamation of at least what we would consider otherwise very neat and tidy animal kinds and categories,
1:40.0	although the animals came first and the categories came later,
1:48.3	which I think is another thing that this poem does,
1:52.7	especially for children who are reading or hearing it,
1:55.9	it wakes you up to that or reminds you that that is the case because it's easy to forget.
1:59.0	And here the platypus is racked with indecision. Fish, flesh, foul, what's it going to be?
2:06.6	He chooses all three, which provokes frustration by the very people who are trying to force neat and tidy classification upon the natural world.
2:19.3	Now, we in our human reason, which is a God-given faculty and quite capable,
2:27.4	we often do a good job of classifying things into groups,
2:31.3	but God and His infinite wisdom has made the world too complex for that to work
	...

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