Mr. Grumpledump's Song

The archetype of the everyman celebrates the common, or every day, person. The everyman often acts as a stand-in for the audience, giving readers a sense of belonging, seeing themselves reflected in the actions and emotions of the main character of a story. Mr. Grumpledump is a type of everyman, symbolizing the negative emotions each person holds inside themselves. From a young age, children are taught that misbehaving is bad and will often result in punishment. As such, young people rarely get to explore their more explosive emotions such as anger, irritation, and even despair. Silverstein gives his young readers permission to feel and express all of these negative emotions throughout “Mr. Grumpledump’s Song,” encouraging emotional expression as opposed to overt bad behavior, using Mr. Grumpledump as a representation of all the pent-up emotions inside them.

The motif of growing up exposes how the creative mind of a child can make the adult world seem much less scary. Silverstein characterizes the speaker of the poem, Mr. Grumpledump, as an old man, unsatisfied and stuck in his ways. Mr. Grumpledump gripes about everything going wrong in his life; however, the image is overall humorous, like that of the old man yelling at the kids to get off his lawn, due to Silverstein’s clever use of