Christina Rossetti

A Frog’s Fate

Contemptuous of his home beyond
The village and the village-pond,
A large-souled Frog who spurned each byeway

Imperial highway

Not just any road—the main thoroughfare built for commerce and travel. The frog mistakes grandeur of setting for grandeur of self.

Hopped along the imperial highway.
Nor grunting pig nor barking dog
Could disconcert so great a Frog.
The morning dew was lingering yet,
His sides to cool, his tongue to wet:
The night-dew, when the night should come,

Morning/night dew

He plans a full day's adventure with a safe return home. The symmetry of his plan makes the interruption more brutal.

A travelled Frog would send him home.
Not so, alas! The wayside grass
Sees him no more: not so, alas!

Broad-wheeled waggon

Heavy commercial cart—wide wheels for hauling goods. The specificity makes this real: not a metaphorical death but an actual traffic accident.

A broad-wheeled waggon unawares
Ran him down, his joys, his cares.
From dying choke one feeble croak
The Frog’s perpetual silence broke: –
“Ye buoyant Frogs, ye great and small,
Even I am mortal after all!
My road to fame turns out a wry way;
I perish on the hideous highway;
Oh for my old familiar byeway!”
The choking Frog sobbed and was gone;
The Waggoner strode whistling on.
Unconscious of the carnage done,
Whistling that Waggoner strode on –
Whistling (it may have happened so)
“A froggy would a-wooing go.”

A froggy would a-wooing go

Popular nursery rhyme from the 1500s about a frog's romantic adventures. The waggoner sings about a fictional frog while crushing a real one.

A hypothetic frog trolled he,
Obtuse to a reality.
O rich and poor, O great and small,
Such oversights beset us all.
The mangled Frog abides incog,
The uninteresting actual frog:

Hypothetic vs. actual

The poem's thesis: we sentimentalize imaginary frogs (in songs, fables) while ignoring real suffering. **Hypothetic** meant "supposed" or "imaginary" in Victorian usage.

The hypothetic frog alone
Is the one frog we dwell upon.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Waggoner's Song

The waggoner whistles "A Frog He Would A-Wooing Go," a nursery rhyme published in 1611 and hugely popular in Victorian England. Every reader would have known it—a cheerful song about Frog courting Miss Mouse, full of comic adventures. Rossetti's irony is surgical: the man who just killed a real frog sings about a fictional one.

Rossetti uses "hypothetic" in its older sense: imaginary, supposed, theoretical. The waggoner is "obtuse to a reality"—literally dull or insensitive to what's actually happened. He can sentimentalize frogs in song while remaining unconscious of "the carnage done."

The final stanza universalizes this. "O rich and poor, O great and small"—everyone does this. We dwell on comfortable fictions (the nursery-rhyme frog, the moral-fable frog) while the "mangled Frog abides incog"—remains unknown, unnoticed, incognito. The real suffering stays invisible.

Rossetti's Fable Technique

This appears in Rossetti's 1872 collection "Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book," but it's not a children's poem—it's a fable about how fables work. The frog's dying speech is mock-heroic: "Even I am mortal after all!" He discovers his mortality in literary language, like a tragic hero.

But Rossetti undercuts the fable's moral authority. Traditional fables punish pride with a lesson learned. Here, nobody learns anything. The frog dies mid-epiphany. The waggoner "strode whistling on," repeated twice for emphasis—he doesn't pause, doesn't notice, doesn't care.

Rossetti wrote this during her years of Anglo-Catholic devotional work, visiting poorhouses and rescue homes for former prostitutes. The poem's concern with "the uninteresting actual"—real suffering that society ignores—reflects her daily confrontation with people treated as invisible. The frog "abides incog" like the poor women she worked with: present but unseen, real but unacknowledged.