How to Tell Wild Animals by Carolyn Wells
Quick answer: How to Tell Wild Animals by Carolyn Wells: summary, stanza analysis, rhyme jokes and poetic devices, plus Class 10 exam questions answered in plain words.
Suppose a large tawny beast walks up to you in an eastern jungle. How will you know what it is? Simple, says Carolyn Wells: if it roars while you are dying, it was an Asian lion. This is the running joke of 'How to Tell Wild Animals', a field guide written by a comedian, in which every method of identifying a predator requires you to be attacked by it first. Wells, an American humorist born in 1862, published the poem in her collection Baubles in 1917 under the title 'How to Tell the Wild Animals', which places it safely in the public domain and on the Class 10 First Flight syllabus.
Wells was staggeringly prolific: well over a hundred books, including parodies, nonsense verse, children's stories and a long shelf of mystery novels, plus the influential Nonsense Anthology she edited in 1902. She knew exactly how comic verse works, and this poem is a small machine built to demonstrate it: strict stanzas, deliberately terrible rhymes, and a narrator whose helpfulness is completely useless.
The poem
If ever you should go by chance
To jungles in the east;
And if there should to you advance
A large and tawny beast,
If he roars at you as you're dyin'
You'll know it is the Asian Lion.
Carolyn Wells, 'How to Tell the Wild Animals' (1917)
What the poem says, beast by beast
The poem is a mock instruction manual. A calm, knowledgeable voice teaches you to distinguish the dangerous animals of Asia, one stanza per creature, and every lesson turns on the same dark joke: the identifying feature is what the animal does to you.
How it works: rhyme as punchline
Wells writes in six-line stanzas rhyming ababcc: a ballad-like quatrain that sets up the situation, then a couplet that lands the joke, exactly where a comedian lands one. The metre alternates four-beat and three-beat lines through the quatrain, then steadies for the punchline couplet. Comic verse needs this regularity the way a drummer needs a steady tempo; the joke arrives on the beat, and part of the laugh is hearing it arrive on time.
The rhymes themselves are jokes. To rhyme with 'lion', Wells cheerfully mangles a word into 'dyin''. Elsewhere she bends spelling and stress until the rhyme is forced through, and the strain is the point: the poem's narrator is trying so hard to be tidy and instructive that language itself buckles. This is called poetic licence, and examiners love the term, but notice what the licence is for. Every tortured rhyme punctures the narrator's authority, reminding you that this expert guide is nonsense from top to bottom.
The other engine is the deadpan. The speaker never acknowledges that the advice is fatal. Being eaten is treated as a minor inconvenience of fieldwork, a caress from a bear is a data point. Humour theorists call this incongruity; a writer would just say the voice never winks. The moment a comic poem admits it is joking, it dies. Wells never admits it.
The tradition it belongs to
This poem sits squarely in the golden age of nonsense verse. Edward Lear's limericks and Lewis Carroll's 'Jabberwocky' had made absurdity respectable in the Victorian nursery, and by Wells's time a whole generation of light-verse writers filled magazines with polished silliness. Wells was one of the best and one of the most knowing; having edited an anthology of nonsense, she wrote it with a scholar's command of the tradition.
What distinguishes her poem is its structure of escalating then collapsing danger. Lion, tiger, leopard, bear: each encounter is lethal. Then hyena and crocodile, merely unsettling. Then the chameleon, which cannot hurt you at all and may not even be there. A lesser writer would have ended on the biggest beast. Wells ends on the smallest, an anticlimax so complete it becomes the best joke in the poem. Ending a list on its weakest item, played straight, is a comic structure still used by humour columnists today.
Why it lasts
Comic poems age badly as a rule; topical jokes rot, and whimsy curdles. This one survives because its joke is structural, not topical. The gap between confident instruction and useless content is evergreen, as anyone who has read a badly written manual knows. Children love the poem because the animals are vivid and the deaths are cartoonish; adults love it because they recognise the voice of every overconfident expert they have ever met.
It also survives because it is genuinely well made. Strip the humour away and the versification would still be admirable: clean stanzas, exact metre, rhymes placed for maximum impact. Light verse is not easy verse. As the old saying among editors goes, it takes a very good poet to write a good bad rhyme on purpose.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the punchline couplet. Whatever your subject, a stanza that sets up for four lines and turns in the last two has a natural comic or dramatic snap. Steal the deadpan too: write your next funny poem as if it were a deadly serious document, a recipe, a safety notice, a terms-and-conditions page, and never once signal the joke.
And steal the anticlimax ending. After your grandest image, add one small, absurd, harmless item and treat it with equal gravity. Readers laugh hardest when the poem refuses to. If you try a comic poem this month, note that humour scores well with judges when the craft underneath is strict; funny and sloppy reads as sloppy.
Exam corner: Class 10 questions answered
The standard questions on this poem, answered in brief.
What poets can take from this
- In exam answers, always name the ababcc stanza and the punchline couplet; structure marks are easy marks.
- Use the term poetic licence for the distorted rhyme spellings, and give one example.
- Point out the crocodile-tears allusion; it shows the poem's humour has literary roots, not just silliness.
- When drafting comic verse of your own, keep the metre strict; jokes land on the beat.
- Never explain a joke inside the poem; deadpan is the whole trick.
- End a comic list on its smallest item, treated as gravely as the largest.
Try it yourself
Write a mock instruction manual poem of four to six stanzas: how to identify house guests, teachers, moods, or monsoon clouds. Each stanza must end in a rhymed couplet punchline, and the identifying test in every stanza must be completely useless to the person applying it.
Questions
What is the central idea of How to Tell Wild Animals?
The poem humorously pretends to teach readers how to identify dangerous wild animals, but every method requires being attacked first: the lion is known by his roar as you die, the tiger by eating you, the bear by his crushing hug. The real subject is the comedy of confident, useless expertise, delivered in a perfectly calm instructional voice.
What poetic devices are used in How to Tell Wild Animals?
The main devices are rhyme arranged in ababcc stanzas with a punchline couplet, poetic licence in deliberately distorted spellings such as dyin' to rhyme with lion, irony and deadpan humour, hyperbole in the animal attacks, and allusion in the reference to crocodile tears.
Who was Carolyn Wells?
Carolyn Wells (1862 to 1942) was a prolific American writer of humour, nonsense verse, children's books and detective novels, author of well over a hundred books. She edited A Nonsense Anthology in 1902 and published this poem in her 1917 collection Baubles, which is why it is now in the public domain.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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