On Runcible Spoons and Owls and Pussy-Cats

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat was one of my favorite poems growing up. I have always been a cat lover, and the sweet and lyrical courtship between the pussy cat and the owl warms my heart to this day. One can't help falling in love in time to the jaunty words:

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea

   In a beautiful pea-green boat

And:

Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl!

   How charmingly sweet you sing!

It was first published in 1871 in a collection called Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets. If you have never read the poem in it's entirety, you can do so here. It's quite a treat!

Edward Lear, the poem's author, was born on this day, May 12, in 1812 in Holloway, England. Here are a few nuggets about Lear and The Owl and the Pussy-Cat:

• Lear was the twentieth of twenty-one children.
• He was an epileptic.
• As an adult, Lear was a prolific letter-writer, sometimes writing as many as 35 friends before breakfast.
• Lear loved to coin new words and phrases. He first used the term runcible spoon in The Owl and the Pussy-Cat. It is now defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a kind of fork, curved like a spoon and typically having three broad prongs, one of which has a sharp edge. (Does this sound like a spork to anyone else? It's not quite how I dreamed a runcible spoon would look.)
• Beatrix Potter wrote a prequel to The Owl and the Pussy-Cat called The Tale of Little Pig Robinson in which Piggy-wig travels to the Land where the Bong-Tree grows. It was published in 1930.

 Be sure to check out more on Edward Lear and his poetry at your local library!

De Jong, Mary. "Edward Lear." Critical Survey Of Poetry, Second Revised Edition (2002): 1-5. Literary Reference Center. Web. 12 May 2015.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edward_Lear_The_Owl_and_the_Pussy_Cat_1.jpg
"runcible, adj." OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 12 May 2015.