"The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" is a poem by Edward Lear. It was originally published 1870 in Our Young Folks: an Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls. One year later Lear would republish the verse in his collection titled Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets. The poem is the fanciful tale of a cat and owl eloping in a boat and using the ring through a pig's nose as a wedding band in a ceremony presided over by a turkey. It was written expressly for Janet Symonds. Symonds was at the time the three-year-old daughter of Lear's friend and fellow writer, John Addington Symonds.
While written for Janet, speculation has historically suggested that it is actually a veiled portrait of Lear's romantic frustrations as a homosexual living during the repressive Victorian Era society. Although categorized as an example of "nonsense poetry" it is actually a very cogent tale of "unnatural love" conquering all.
In 2014, "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat" topped a poll of the most beloved children's poems in British history. Its popularity has never been questioned as its story almost immediately took on a life of its own beyond the confines of Lear's verse. In 1930, Beatrix Potter published a book which tells the backstory of how the pig came to be in the faraway land in which Lear's story takes place. Almost seventy years later, former Monty Python member Eric Idle published The Quite Remarkable Adventures of the Owl and the Pussycat which expands Lear's very short poem into a book exceeding one-hundred pages. In addition to these examples, the poem has been adapted into multiple animated or musical versions.
