Television
The poem usually titled “Mike Teavee” but that can occasionally be found listed simply under the name "Television" occurs as one of the Oompa-Loompa songs in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, of course, therefore making it one of Dahl’s most well-known works of verse. But the song lyrics—corrosive as they are—don’t tell half the story of Dahl’s seething revulsion for what he terms “the idiotic thing…found in almost every house we’ve seen.” The nearly 100-verse-long poem features extended sequences written in ALL CAPS to further underline just how much the author considers television to be perhaps the central symbol of the collapse of the civilization in the 20th century. Read the poem to understand why that statement is only just barely hyperbolic.
Goldilocks
“Goldilocks and the Three Bears” is one of the poems featured in Revolting Rhymes which refashions familiar fairy tales for the modern child’s imagination. Cinderella, for instance, features a psychopathic Prince whom the heroine kicks to the curb in favor a decent non-aristocratic type of guy. The most faithful rendering of the familiar tales is the one involving Goldilocks except that the storyteller here casts her break-in of the bears’ home in a criminal light and completely upends the conventional perspective of the fairy tale. Thus, Goldilocks becomes Dahl’s most powerful symbol for the way the meaning of a story is often deceptively dependent upon how it is being told.
Jack (from the Beanstalk)
Jack in this case being one of those many famous Jacks from the world of fairy tales and folks tales; in this case the guy who climbed up the beanstalk. Now, normally, Jack is situated as a symbol for taking a chance in life; he is the guy who traded something of worth for something of seemingly no worth that turned out to have a wildly unexpected big payoff. Kids probably do not really get that part of the story, however, because they focus on the most famous line: “I smell the blood of an Englishman.” Dahl, thinking like a little kid, also zeroes in on that particular aspect of the tale to transform Jack’s symbolic meaning. Heck, any kid could tell you that if Jack really wanted to steal everything right out from the giant’s nose, the key lies in covering up that dead giveaway: his odor. The moral of the story in Dahl’s hands is the value of listening to your parents and bathing regularly. Symbolically, however, Jack is kind of like Goldilocks in that what adults think a story is about is not necessarily what kids might think the story is about.
"The Pig"
The title character of this poem is a pig smart enough to figure out how planes fly, but who nevertheless struggles with existential philosophy. What does it mean to be a pig? What is the meaning of life for his species. Eventually he figures it out and the answer is enlightening, but not particularly satisfying: the meaning of life for a pig is to wait around until you become bacon or pork chops or a roast for humans to eat. The morning after arriving at this discovery, the pig takes it upon himself to kill Farmer Bland before the farmer kills him and, what’s more, to make a feat of the farmer and thus avoid the other way around. This bright British pig becomes in this act one of Dahl’s most fundamentally significant symbols of the essential quality of perspective upon all things. Just because one is born a pig need not mean that the meaning of their life is carved in stone. Dahl comically—but truthfully—gives predetermination a swift kick in the logic with this poem.
Mother Christmas
Interestingly, Roald Dahl penned “Where art Thou, Mother Christmas”—a rare excursion into holiday verse—for a charitable cause. Namely, to honor Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. While the poem’s elevation of a maternal figure as the real power behind Santa's throne might well play into the general concept of a hospital built specifically to treat children, the text itself speaks to something more fundamentally larger which seems to have been occupying Dahl’s mind. Put bluntly: the poem’s unexpectedly brutal final line is essential to transforming Mother Christmas into Dahl’s most forthright symbol of feminist empowerment:
“So Hail To Mother Christmas
Who shoulders all the work
And down with Father Christmas,
That unmitigated jerk.”
