Look at all those monkeys
 Jumping in their cage.
 Why don't they all go out to work
 And earn a decent wage?

     How can you say such silly things,
     And you a son of mine?
     Imagine monkeys travelling on
     The Morden-Edgware line!

 But what about the Pekinese!
 They have an allocation.
 'Don't travel during Peke hour',
 It says on every station.

     My Gosh, you're right, my clever boy,
     I never thought of that!
     And so they left the monkey house,
     While an elephant raised his hat.

Anyone can produce doggerel, but it’s incredibly difficult to write good meaningless verse, the kind that stays in your mind for more than an instant after your first reading. Spike Milligan manages to do so all the time. His poems are, if anything, even more whimsical and surreal than those by (say) Nash or Belloc¹, but there’s a bizarre internal logic, a lunatic consistency, that elevates them to another level entirely.

— Thomas

Minstrels Links

Monkeys:
Poem #1319, Goats and Monkeys – Derek Walcott
Poem #1483, An Infinite Number of Monkeys – Ronald Koertge

Elephants:
Poem #1178, Mmenson – Edward Kamau Braithwaite
Poem #1179, The Blind Men and the Elephant – John Godfrey Saxe

Hippopopopopotami:
Poem #124, The Hippopotamus – Hilaire Belloc
Poem #844, The Hippopotamus – Oliver Herford
Poem #845, Recipe for a Hippopotamus Sandwich – Shel Silverstein
Poem #846, The Hippopotamus – T. S. Eliot
Poem #847, On the Death of Smet-Smet, the Hippopotamus-Goddess – Rupert Brooke
Poem #848, The Hippopotamus – Ogden Nash

Other Large Animals:
Poem #120, The Purple Cow – Gelett Burgess
Poem #215, The Loch Ness Monster’s Song – Edwin Morgan
Poem #775, The Maldive Shark – Herman Melville
Poem #896, The Kraken – Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Poem #854, Very Like a Whale – Ogden Nash
Poem #903, Leviathan – Anon.

More Spike Milligan:
Poem #701, Teeth
Poem #831, The Soldiers at Lauro
Poem #1044, Contagion
Poem #1196, The ABC
Poem #1207, Hamlet