A Silly Poem - Analysis

A tragedy collapsed into a doodle

Spike Milligan’s central move is to take one of English literature’s most solemn love-and-death stories and make it instantly, defiantly unserious. The poem opens with the weighty, familiar names Hamlet and Ophelia, which carry a whole tragic world behind them. But instead of grief, revenge, or moral paralysis, Hamlet announces something small and domestic: I’ll draw a sketch of thee. The joke works because it deliberately mismatches the cultural “size” of Shakespeare with the humble act of drawing, shrinking grand drama into a quick cartoon.

The pun as the poem’s sudden “turn”

The poem sets up a genuine-sounding question—What kind of pencil shall I use?—and then flips it into a single punchline: 2B or not 2B? That last line is a compact parody of Hamlet’s most famous phrasing, but it’s also a literal shopper’s dilemma about pencil hardness. The turn is sharp: the reader is invited to hear the echo of existential crisis, and then forced to accept a stationery choice instead. Milligan doesn’t just reference Shakespeare; he converts the whole problem of being into the problem of writing.

High seriousness versus cheap materials

The key tension is between what Hamlet is “supposed” to be doing and what he’s doing here. In Shakespeare, the question to be presses on life, death, and meaning; in Milligan, 2B is graphite. The poem makes a sly point about how easily elevated language can be flattened into a pun, and how cultural icons can be handled like props. Even Ophelia becomes less a person than a subject for a sketch, a playful reduction that mirrors the poem’s reduction of tragedy itself.

What the joke quietly asks of the reader

The tone is breezy and mischievous, but the joke lands because we still feel the “ghost” of the original line behind it. The poem depends on the reader’s reverence—at least a little—for Shakespeare, so it can mischievously break it. In that sense, the silliness isn’t empty; it’s a quick test of how language slips between meanings, and how easily the most loaded phrases in literature can be remade into something as disposable as a pencil choice.