How Doth the Little Crocodile Lyrics
Eight lines in which a crocodile polishes his tail, pours Nile water on his scales and grins a welcome to little fishes. Lewis Carroll wrote it for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, as a mixed-up version of a well-known poem about a bee.
How Doth the Little Crocodile
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On ev'ry golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!
Printed from https://nurseryrhymes.co/how-doth-the-little-crocodile/
- Type
- Poems for Children
- Written by
- Lewis Carroll
- First published
- 1865
- Tune
- Read with a grin, as if the crocodile were doing the talking
- Best for ages
- 5 to 10 years
What Does How Doth the Little Crocodile Mean?
The poem is a polite, tidy picture of a crocodile until the last two lines. He improves his shining tail, pours the waters of the Nile over each golden scale, grins cheerfully and spreads his claws neatly. Then he welcomes little fishes in with gently smiling jaws. The kindness is only on the surface: it is the crocodile who is inviting, and the fishes are the guests. That is the sly joke, and it is why the poem is funny without any harm being shown.
A few words: doth is an old form of "does", and improve here means make better use of. The Nile is the long river of Egypt, where crocodiles live.
The poem is deliberately a wrong version of another one. The first line, "How doth the little crocodile", copies "How doth the little busy bee" and swaps a bee for a crocodile.
History and Origin
The original is Isaac Watts's "Against Idleness and Mischief", a poem for children in his Divine Songs of 1715, which tells them to be busy like a bee gathering honey from every flower. Children learned it by heart, so it was a good target for a joke.
Carroll used the joke in his story of 1865. In chapter 2 Alice, doubting who she is after so many strange changes, tries to prove she still knows her lessons by reciting the bee poem, and it comes out as the crocodile verses instead.
Learning Activities
- Bee and crocodile: read the bee poem's first line and the crocodile's first line one after the other, and see which words changed.
- Write your own: swap the animal and its habits, for example how doth the little polar bear, and finish two lines.
- Crocodile smile: practise a big, slow, gentle smile in a mirror while saying the last two lines.
- Draw the Nile: paint a river with a crocodile at the edge and a few fishes, and talk about what a crocodile really eats.