Poem of the Day: ‘The Lay of the Trilobite’

From an 1885 issue of the satirical magazine Punch, a name-dropping romp through the idea of evolution.

Carnegie Museum of Natural History via Wikimedia Commons
A fossilized shrimp from the Jurassic period. Carnegie Museum of Natural History via Wikimedia Commons

For one of its lighter Wednesday selections, the Sun offers today the comic “Lay of the Trilobite,” which satirizes the Darwinian evolutionary theory that on one level or another saturated the culture of late-Victorian England. As the University of Reading’s John Holmes has noted, the name of the author, May Kendall (1864–1943), did not initially appear when the poem ran, one of a series of “lays,” many on scientific themes, in an 1885 issue of the satirical magazine Punch. The voice of the poem, set out in common-meter octets with abab rhymes, would have seemed to represent simply the magazine’s official, collective voice: witty, ironic, incisive. Yet it manages to be Kendall’s voice as well. Daughter of a Methodist minister, founder of a chapter of the Fabian Socialist Society in York (where she passed most of her life), Kendall — whose biography remains thin — seems to have been a person whose convictions would tally with the poem’s laughter at natural and social hierarchies. At any rate, the poem seems thoroughly to enjoy its own name-dropping romp through the idea of evolution, not to mention the lack of a biologically correct rhyme for “nation,” which forces the eloquent trilobite to devolve into a shrimp.

The Lay of the Trilobite 
by May Kendall 

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