Roy
Roald Dahl has kind of a strange, ambivalent relationship with his mother country. He is not shy about criticizing British customs and traditions, but on the other hand there is a poem like “The Ant-Eater.” The main character is a spoiled rotten little San Francisco boy named Roy who gets an anteater as a gift and proceeds to torture it by not making ants easily available. Ultimately, the story reaches a climax that also includes a six-line parenthetical aside based on the “improper” American pronunciation of the word “Aunt.” Pronouncing it so that it rhymes with “can’t” instead of “haunt” costs not just Roy his life, but also his Aunt Dorothy. That neither of those are to be considered major losses to the world only cements Roy’s symbolic status as the embodiment of the crude American relative to his sophisticated and cultured British cousin.
Miss Milky Daisy
Miss Milky Daisy is a seemingly normal cow who develops wings and the ability to fly. This talent makes her a worldwide sensation around the world takes to television coverage. There is just one person who is not enamored of Daisy and he is described as a “quite horrid man” who makes the lone trek from Afghanistan just to personally insult Daisy in person. The reward for this effort is a cowpie dropped from on high, thereby transforming a simple story into a symbolic tale of the culture clash between western Christian nations and Islamic theocracies in the Middle East. One must keep in mind that Dirty Beasts was published in 1983 when tensions between these cultures had already been simmering to the point of boiling over.
“The Pig”
The title character of this poem comes to an existential epiphany. He realizes that his existence is based on how he is valued by others and he decides to take ownership of his own life. He winds up killing and eating the farmer. This makes the pig one of the greatest symbols of class consciousness and economic revolution ever put into print.
“The Tummy Beast”
The title beast of this closing poem makes a surprise literal appearance at the end. Up to then, the suggestion is that he exists entirely as metaphorical figure. Either way, literal or metaphor, the tummy beast is still a symbol for the deadly sin of gluttony. The poem is about a kid who can’t control his appetite.
The Toad/Snail/Roly-Poly Bird
The kid narrator of “The Toad and the Snail” relates an imaginative story about a weird creature that stars out as a toad, turns into a snail and ends up as a bird. Along the way, the creature—big enough for the kid to ride upon—takes the boy upon a series of trans-European adventures. The story ends with the kid directly addressing child readers by commiserating with them in the shared secret that all know adults will never believe such an outlandish story. The creature is thus incarnated as the symbol of youthful imagination which is lost during maturity.
