Mr. Grumpledump's Song

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1974

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Everyman

The archetype of the everyman celebrates the common, or every day, person. The everyman often acts as a stand-in for the audience, giving readers a sense of belonging, seeing themselves reflected in the actions and emotions of the main character of a story. Mr. Grumpledump is a type of everyman, symbolizing the negative emotions each person holds inside themselves. From a young age, children are taught that misbehaving is bad and will often result in punishment. As such, young people rarely get to explore their more explosive emotions such as anger, irritation, and even despair. Silverstein gives his young readers permission to feel and express all of these negative emotions throughout “Mr. Grumpledump’s Song,” encouraging emotional expression as opposed to overt bad behavior, using Mr. Grumpledump as a representation of all the pent-up emotions inside them.

Growing Up

The motif of growing up exposes how the creative mind of a child can make the adult world seem much less scary. Silverstein characterizes the speaker of the poem, Mr. Grumpledump, as an old man, unsatisfied and stuck in his ways. Mr. Grumpledump gripes about everything going wrong in his life; however, the image is overall humorous, like that of the old man yelling at the kids to get off his lawn, due to Silverstein’s clever use of rhyme and quick wit (see: Literary Devices “Form and Meter”). Growing up means searching for one’s identity and place in the wider world. Silverstein suggests that growing up will be full of change—change that children may not always want to face, just like Mr. Grumpledump. However, by making Mr. Grumpledump’s despair humorous and approachable, Silverstein shows that there is always an optimistic way to look at change, demonstrating that the process of growing up—and of life in general—can be a fun challenge as opposed to a scary one for his young readers, even on those Grumpledump-like-days.

Nature

“Mr. Grumpledump’s Song” is full of natural imagery. The speaker observes the moon and stars, the sunshine and cloud cover, and the water, sand, and rocks that cover the ground. Traditionally, natural images symbolize serenity and harmony. However, by overwhelming readers with a myriad of unconnected natural features, Silverstein instead uses nature to symbolize the forces that are beyond human control but that nonetheless affect us deeply. Mr. Grumpledump complains about the temperature (Line 3), the “drippy” quality of water (Line 11), and the happiness of those around him (Line 17): all things that are out of his immediate control. Nature acts as a way to show readers that the poem’s narrator is not one hundred percent reliable. If two things as different and impersonal as the sun and the clouds are considered contemptible, this suggests that perhaps the issue lies with Mr. Grumpledump’s disposition rather than the world itself. Silverstein suggests to young readers that, while bad days are universal and negative feelings are perfectly normal, sometimes the clouds in our life are in fact being created by us instead of by nature.