Roald Dahl is that rare breed of author and poet who accomplishes the seemingly impossible; he writes stories and poems that children want to read and adults are delighted to read to them; his poems are just gory and gross enough for even the non-reading little boy to be captivated by, but they also contain a message or a lesson that pleases his parents. In Dahl's poems, justice and fairness seem to emerge victorious even though they may both seem rather brutal or harsh.
But aren't the poems all rather violent? Well, yes, they are; people are eaten, children become lunch for a crocodile and a farmer becomes a nice juicy sandwich for a pig; eyeballs pop our as a result of too much television, and a stomach develops a vocabulary of its own when faced with extreme hunger. These are all fairly nasty, ends for anyone to meet, but they are so outlandish so hyperbolic and so completely out of the realms of possibility that they do not seem genuinely threatening of brutal. They are almost comic in their brutality.
In the majority of the poems there is an Aesop-like fable quality, a lesson, if you will. The poems that are about some of the characters in Dahl's novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are the prime examples of this because every behavior that they exhibit has a definite consequence. Mike TeaVee warns children not to watch too much television. It equates television watching with laziness,fecklessness and the gradual degradation of both brain function and eye health. Augustus Gloop warns against excessive candy eating as it can be addictive, and also leads to terrible obesity. Each action has a consequence in a Dahl poem.
There is also a tendency in the poems for the authority figure to be beaten by the upstart or the underdog. This can either be a child who bests their parents, or proves them wrong such as the boy in The Tummy Beast, or Piggy in The Pig, who outwits Farmer Bland and eats him, before he gets the chance to make lunch out of Piggy himself. These poems give hope to even the most underdog of children, and show that in the end the bully is beatable. This is something that is an appealing theme to both parents and children.
