Mr. Grumpledump's Song

Despair is one of the main thematic concerns of Silverstein’s “Mr. Grumpledump’s Song.” Despair is conveyed most prominently through the speaker’s overarching tone of hopelessness and frustration with everything around him. Silverstein starts and ends “Mr. Grumpledump’s Song” with the same assertion that “everything [is] wrong,” painting a portrait of a man fixed in his ways and unwilling to choose optimism in a world he feels is against him (see: Literary Devices “Circular Narrative”) (Lines 1, 20). The circular nature of the poem reinforces this thematic idea, and yet, “Mr. Grumpledump’s Song” is also extremely humorous and lighthearted. Silverstein’s use of juvenile descriptors like “fluffy” and “drippy” combined with the unpredictable end rhymes of each line add levity to poem’s otherwise dark thematic concerns, encouraging readers to not take anything too seriously (Lines 5, 11).

In the context of his audience, Silverstein uses Mr. Grumpledump as an example so young readers can explore their own complex emotions (see: Symbols and Motifs “The Everyman”). While the canon of children’s literature is vast, a majority of the reading material aimed at younger audiences work to infantilize children, or else, only teach them morality in the binary of right and wrong (see: Further Literary Resources “The Third Mr. Silverstein”). Silverstein subverts these ideas by acknowledging the fact that sometimes everyone feels like Mr. Grumpledump: frustrated, annoyed, and a little bit hopeless. Silverstein allows young readers to explore their own emotional capacities within the safe space of his poetry, providing them a creative outlet for bad feelings, and admitting, in good humor, how silly it is to despair unproductively about every little detail in life.