Bongaloo - Analysis

A father invents certainty out of nonsense

Milligan’s poem pretends to answer a child’s simple question, but its real joke is that the father’s confidence is the only solid thing in the room. Each time the son asks What is, How strange, What shape, the father replies in the tone of an expert—said I, I replied, I’ll explain—while offering definitions that are deliberately unusable. The poem is less interested in building a creature than in showing how an adult voice can sound authoritative even when it’s improvising. The Bongaloo becomes a parody of explanation itself: language performing knowledge without providing it.

The Bongaloo as a collage of mismatched parts

The first “definition” is a stitched-together absurdity: a tall bag of cheese plus a Chinaman’s knees and the leg of a nanny goat’s eye. The parts don’t belong together, and even the anatomy won’t hold: an eye doesn’t have a leg. That small impossibility matters, because it signals that the poem isn’t merely being silly; it’s showing how description can be made to sound precise while actually dismantling logic. Even the “shape” lesson keeps that false precision: it’s tall round the nose, and the nose continually grows toward Spain. “Spain” is comically specific and entirely arbitrary—a destination that makes the Bongaloo feel like it’s always pointing elsewhere, always escaping being pinned down.

Strangeness that dresses up and sails away

The second stanza turns the Bongaloo into a kind of moving mirage. It appears when the sun’s in the West, wearing a vest, and sailing out with the noonday tide. West, noon, tide: the coordinates don’t neatly match, and that mismatch creates a dreamy instability, as if time itself is being played with. The tone stays jaunty, but the images suggest something slippery: the creature doesn’t just look odd; it arrives under impossible conditions and then departs. The tension here is between the child’s desire to hold the Bongaloo still—know it, name it—and the father’s pleasure in making it ungraspable.

A final doubt: did you think I’d tell you a lie?

The last stanza introduces the poem’s sharpest turn. The father insists, I’ve seen it, then immediately undercuts himself with not quite and the paradox a dark sunny night. That phrase is the poem admitting, in its own way, that the “evidence” is as contradictory as the earlier descriptions. The closing question—Do you think I’d tell you a lie?—puts the son (and the reader) in a bind: the father demands trust while demonstrating unreliability. The Bongaloo ends up as a test of belief, but also a small portrait of parenting: the adult both protects the child with confident stories and quietly teaches that certainty can be a performance.