Monday Morning

Poems by J.R.R. Tolkien
Monday Morning
Poem Information
Written	Between September of 1931 and September of 1934
Published	The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien
Subject(s)	Tolkien Family

Monday Morning is a humorous poem written by J.R.R. Tolkien in the early 1930s "where everything goes wrong for him, from slipping on soap to falling down stairs" one morning on a Monday.

Poem excerpt

On Monday morning all agree
that most annoying things can be.
Now I will tell you in this song
of one when everything went wrong.
The sun was early shining bright,
but not, of course, for my delight:
it woke the birds who woke mama,
who woke the boys, who woke papa;
it came and hit me in the eye,
though still I wished in bed to lie.

Background

Sometime between September of 1931 and September of 1934, Tolkien wrote a long comedic poem that notably featured two characters who shared the names of Christopher Tolkien and Michael Tolkien, though Tolkien subsequently changed the character names to James and Williams respectively.

In 2024, the poem was published in September as entry 122 of The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien. In their commentary to Rhyme, Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull compare the "the account of successive crises and dramas" in the poem to Monday Morning. In their Addenda and Corrigenda, Hammond and Scull mention that on a "later re-reading" of the poem, the fifth and sixth lines caused them to think about two similar lines from Lewis Carroll's The Walrus and the Carpenter.