Custard the Dragon, and the Missing Stanza

Cafe Society
1

I’m teaching a poetry unit to my fourth graders, and as part of the unit, I give them a selection of 20 poems to choose from (or they can bring in their own) to learn, interpret, and perform before the class. It’s a fun exercise in close reading of poetry.

Today was the performance day, and after all the students, I offered to perform a different poem. Since nobody in the class had selected Ogden Nash’s excellent “The Tale of Custard the Dragon,” they chose that one. I have it memorized, so I performed it, and then asked for a reflection on what I did to interpret the poem (hand gestures, changing my voice, etc.)

One comment shocked me: “I really liked the lines you added to it,” someone said. “You know, the lines about how everyone else thought they were brave.”

I was baffled–I hadn’t, as far as I knew, added anything. A few of them had been following along with the online copy of the poem I’d given them, and they showed me what they meant–

and the key stanza, the most important one in the poem, was missing!

Here’s the missing stanza:

But presently up spoke little dog Mustard,
I’d have been twice as brave if I hadn’t been flustered.
And up spoke Ink and up spoke Blink,
We’d have been three times as brave, we think,
And Custard said, I quite agree
That everybody is braver than me.

(You can find it on page 16 of this teacher’s guide)

The thing is, there are dozens of copies of the poem online–and the majority of them are missing that stanza. And it’s the stanza that best demonstrates the hypocrisy of everyone in the poem, and drives home Nash’s point about how the bravest people aren’t the ones who tell everyone how brave they are. Without that stanza, the poem loses its teeth.

What’s going on? Did Nash add this stanza in later? Did some famous edition of the poem omit it?

Or is this just a case of a bunch of lazy teachers (pointing a finger at myself here as well) just copypastaing off each other on the Internet, and one lazy teacher messed it up for all the rest of us?

2

My grandmother used to read to me when I was a child, and Ogden Nash was a favorite of hers. I can’t say I memorized that poem, but I did hear it and later read it many times. I do not remember that verse at all. She read from a book of his poems, about 60 years ago, so?

3

I learned it from a children’s book illustrated version, linked here at the correct time. The chances that this author and publisher and editor all messed it up seems very low to me–is maybe there are different versions published by Ogden Nash himself?

4

I have a 30-35 year old collected poems of Nash, and that verse is in it.

5

I’ve searched Google Books, and it doesn’t appear to show up before 1984.

There’s something a bit off about it. It’s a six line stanza, while all the rest are four lines. And there’s something not quite right about the rhythm. “up spoke Ink and up spoke Blink” just doesn’t match the rest of it.

I think it’s been added by another person.

6

You’re right that it follows a different pattern. My interpretation is that this is because it’s the most important stanza: it breaks the pattern to draw attention to itself.

I strongly doubt it was added by someone else–that seems like a major transgression against a poem, and one that would be noted. But that discrepancy is what I’m curious about.

7

That phrase, “Up spoke little dog Mustard” also showing up in the 1962 book “Girls are Silly,” another Ogden Nash book published while he was alive.

8

Conveniently, I work in a library. I quickly dashed over to the children’s section, and found an edition of the poem published as a picture book, illustrated by Nash’s daughter Linell Nash Smith (credited as just “Linell”). Published by Little, Brown, and Co., under the title “Custard the Dragon” (omitting “The Tale of”). Publication date, 1959.

The stanza in question is right there.

9

Amazing–thank you! I wonder at what point it began to be omitted, and why.

My wife wonders whether someone decided it harshed the buzz of the poem, and wanted something more anodyne, and removed it. Or maybe someone didn’t like how it broke the rhyme scheme and rhythm and decided to take it out.

In any case, I added it back in for my students, and rushed down the hallway to give the corrected copy to a couple of kids yesterday, so they could perform it correctly this week.

10

No problem. You got me curious. :slight_smile:

And thank you for introducing me to this poem, which I had never read before. I don’t know a great deal of Nash beyond the various epigrams that you see quoted here and there.

11

Oh, it’s so good! The picture book version I linked to above is beautifully done–and has a very clever bit of visual commentary.

There’s a stanza that closely repeats at the beginning of the book and at the end. In the text, the only real difference is tense (past and present). But check out the visuals in that video, starting at 0:54, and then again at 4:00, after the real bravery of the characters is revealed.

The reader in that video is not at all to my tastes–she reads it in a singsong that takes out all the thrill and excitement–but the book she’s reading is great.

12

Does it? Are you sure? If you are referring to the link I posted earlier, note that Google books frequently shows false hits. If there is no snippet shown, as in this case, it is dubious if a phrase actually occurs in a book.

13

As a regular on the Thread Games song lyrics thread who has run across this issue with a number of songs, you simply ran across the tendency of these sites to simply copy from each other mindlessly and shamelessly in an endless circle jerk. Not in the least surprised that poem sites would do it too.

My go-to example which closely parallels yours is from Simple Minds’ “In Trance as Mission”:

I see the time by the track
Can’t see the road for the tears
Taking kingdom for sun
Hands grabbing air

About the only place you’ll find this stanza is here on this forum, in this post and another I made about this issue several years ago.

14

Has anyone yet found a published (as in, in a dead-tree book) version without this stanza?

15

This appears to be a digitized version of a school textbook. It includes the poem, but doesn’t seem to include the stanza in question.

Hard to be certain from Google snippet view, though.

16

I know (and love) this poem from The Golden Treasure of Poetry, selected by Louis Untermeyer and published in 1959. It doesn’t contain the stanza in question.

17

Both from '59!? Very odd indeed!

18

I’ll just point out that it’s a lot easier to be brave when you’re a realio, trulyo dragon than when you’re a mouse, or even a cat or a dog.

19

So I think we’ve tracked down the culprit. I knew that Louis Untermeyer guy was not to be trusted!

20

This seemed to me the likeliest explanation, until

which gets me back to wondering whether some busybody decided they understood Nash’s poem better than Nash did, and deliberately removed a stanza they found awkward or too sharp.