levelheaded: Reduced Sentence or Snagglepuss Ponders His Own Mortality

This poem’s speaker has a few complaints about his motel. First he tells us, “There’s no bible in my nightstand.” Then he complains about the gate. Then he complains about the absence of pillows and mints. He observes people swimming in a motel pool, though to him they are “angels,” “seraphim and cherubim.” If it weren’t for the poem’s title and first two lines – those outright references to Snagglepuss – the poem might be taken as a straightforward soliloquy on his accommodations.

This isn’t to say there aren’t interesting or enigmatic moments amid these complaints and observations. Take the “sirens” near the end of the poem. They may refer to the sirens of an emergency vehicle outside our speaker’s motel window. In this sense, the sirens bring to mind bad, impending things. Coupled with the “South Seas cruise,” the sirens also refer to those mythical creatures that seduce and kill wayward sailors. They send us back to the aforementioned “seraphim and cherubim” swimming in the motel pool, creating another knot of beauty and danger. All this (plus the unexpected rhyme made with “cruise” and “cues”) makes for a jewel of a couplet wherein regret turns sharply into a cue for the poem’s “great escape,” its “checking out.”

So, what about “Snagglepuss” and his “Betsy” and “Murgatroyd?” Well, that’s where the real fun begins. The poem is replete with Snagglepuss speech. “Murgatroyd” refers to Snagglepuss’s exclamation, “Heavens to Murgatroyd!” The enigmatic “Exit, no exit” switches up his “Exit, stage left” to something more sinister. “No pillow, even” signals Snagglepuss’s tendency to append his observations with an extraneous “even.” We highly recommend reading the poem out loud in Snagglepuss’s voice (if you need another example watch this SNL skit). The poem veils its ponderous seriousness with the exaggerated comedy of Snagglepuss, though ultimately the poem is dead serious.

Snagglepuss tells us “This motel must belong to Betsy. / It must be Murgatroyd’s, even.” This starts us thinking of heaven (“Heavens to Betsy!”) abstractly and as a literal setting for the poem. After all, there are angels. There is no exit (besides the “great escape” near the end). And what motel has a “gate?” The poem’s cartoonishness gives real emotion, real tragedy, and real death an edge of unreality. Because Snagglepuss sounds ridiculous when he talks through “What wickedness this way comes,” we all sound ridiculous. His pondering of mortality works like a caricature – we’re excited to see a comic version of ourselves, but why did the artist have to draw our teeth so big?

-The Editors