Unforgettable nonsense: Anon, ‘I Eat My Peas With Honey’

I eat my peas with honey;
I’ve done it all my life.
It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on the knife.

*****

The staying power of well-turned nonsense rhymes is testament to the value of rhythm and rhyme for keeping something intact, perfectly remembered. The poem’s joke is well done, with a good punchline; but the word-for-word memorability comes from the magic of verse.

The Poetry Foundation recognises this poem as having been recited in the American comedy/quiz show ‘It Pays to Be Ignorant‘ on 2nd February 1944 (or more likely 7th February 1944), you can hear Harry McNaughton read it here, and my guess is that he (or another of the show’s writers) was the author. Apparently some people have thought it was written by Shel Silverstein (1930-1999), but this is denied by his Estate and its archivists. Others in the US have stated it is by Ogden Nash. In the UK it has been labeled as Spike Milligan’s. It is an object lesson in optimistic (i.e. false) attribution. But even in Arnold Silcock’s collection ‘Verse and Worse’ (Faber & Faber, 1952) it is only credited to Anonymous… whose birth was a long time ago, and whose death is not expected any time soon.

Photo: “I eat peas with honey – Day 101 of Project 365” by purplemattfish is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.