Dirty Beasts Literary Elements

Anthropomorphic animal tales in verse for children

England, San Francisco, France in the perpetual present-day

Various; some poems feature a first-person narrator actually involved in the action while others are narrated by an external third-person observer, often tinged and ironic perspective. On occasion, this third-person narrator interrupts the action to provide a quick opinionated commentary.

The tone for many if not most of the poems is sardonically ironic. The poems generally tend to build toward an unexpected turn that causes a sudden change in direction of mood which manifests in a variety of ways including the horrific, the philosophical, and the satirical.

In stories in which the beast goes up against a human, the animal is usually the protagonist and the human is the antagonist: pig vs. farmer, ant-eater versus spoiled rotten kid, etc.

Various: A pig reaches an existential moment of realization that he is simply meat in the world of humans and gets his revenge, a spoiled kid receives an ant-eater as a gift but makes no effort to provide the animal with access to his preferred food, a popular flying cow meets a heckler from Afghanistan.

Various: A narrator waxing a little too poetically about what lions eat finds out the answer is about to be him, a child-eating crocodile in a bedtime story being read by a father to his child turns out to be real and on the prowl outside the door, a mother learns that her son isn’t just a “greedy, guzzling brat” making up a story about a person that lives inside his tummy and demands food all the time.

The opening to the poem “The Scorpion” might be considered an example of ironic foreshadowing with its promise that “That here in England where you are / You’ll never find (or so it’s said) / A scorpion inside your bed.” Of course, the poem ends up with the little British girl being read to by her mother in the grips of sheer terror as a scorpion seems to be crawling right up her leg.

The final lines of the book serve as the conclusion to “The Tummy Beast.” This is a rather macabre story featuring a distinctly unpleasant mother who not only believes her son is making up stories, but calls his horribly offensive names. She gets her just desserts upon finding out the truth which happens to a peculiarly grotesque truth that there actually is a gluttonous being calling her son’s stomach home. The final image is an appropriately understated way to bring such a bizarre tale to its end: “But mummy answered nothing more, / for she had fainted on the floor.”

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Foreigners—by which is mean non-British—people do not fare well in this collection. A persistent recurring theme in the imagery spread across multiple poems is one that finds residents of countries other than the United Kingdom somewhat lacking in the social graces. The spoiled kid in San Francisco becomes the victim of a hungry anteater not just because he is spoiled, but because of his American pronunciation of “aunt.” A man travels all the way from Afghanistan just to insult a British flying cow. And the peculiar preference of the French for eating the legs of frogs come under dark scrutiny in “The Toad and the Snail.”

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The narrator of “The Lion” adopts parallelism to gives his poem listing all the potential food that the lion finds “the tenderest of the lot” a bit of stylistic pizzazz and structure: “He will not say a roast of lamb / Or curried beef or devilled ham / Or crispy pork or corned beef hash / Or sausages or mutton mash.”

When “The Pig” comes to an existential epiphany that the meaning of his life is based entirely on his value as food to humans, he makes use of metonymy to substitute specific aspects of the food industry as a metaphor encompassing the whole: “The butcher’s shop! The carving knife! / That is the reason for my life!”

Practically the entire book is an example of personification as animals of all types are given various human attributes ranging from the merely physical to the possession of upper level abstract thinking skills.