Beautiful Soup Lyrics

The song is a long sigh of praise for a bowl of soup. The first verse describes it: "so rich and green", "waiting in a hot tureen". A tureen is the deep covered dish that soup is served from at a table. The singer asks who would not stoop (bend down) for such dainties, meaning delicious things, and then sings the name of the soup over and over: "Soup of the evening, beautiful soup".

The second verse goes further. Who cares for fish, or "game" (birds and animals hunted for food), or any other dish? Who would not give up everything else for just "two pennyworth" of it? A pennyworth is as much as a penny will buy, so two pennyworth is cheap. Carroll splits the word across two lines, "two p-" and "ennyworth", so that "two p" can be sung as one syllable that rhymes with "soup".

Both verses end with the same stretched-out chorus, "Soo-oop of the e-e-ev'ning, beautiful, beautiful soo-oo-oop!", and the spelling shows how to sing it: draw each vowel out as long as possible.

Lewis Carroll published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865. The Mock Turtle sings this song near the end of chapter 10, after the Lobster Quadrille. The text here is from Songs from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, published in October 1921, which sets Carroll's songs to music.