The Spangled Pandemonium

"The Spangled Pandemonium" is a popular children's poem by Palmer Brown. It is often studied and memorized by children in primary grades across Canada and the United StatesFact|date=January 2007, and appeared in the Arbuthnot Anthology of Children's Literature, edited by May Hill Arbuthnot. The poem is written in alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter, a variation on the ballad meter, and reminiscent of common nursery rhyme meter; trimeter is commonly used for comic or light verse. The poem is often considered a "nonsense" poem since a "spangled pandemonium" is a made-up concept. A "spangle" means to be decorated with shiny objects (a "spangled banner") while pandemonium means uproar, wild confusion, or disorder. The term is a neologism from John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost. From the Greek "παν", meaning "all" or "every", and "δαιμόνιον", meaning "little spirit" or "little angel" (or, as Christians interpreted it, "little daemon", and later, "demon"), Pandemonium can be roughly translated as "All Demons", the name of the city that Satan builds in hell after his fall. A "spangled pandemonium" can then be imagined as an animal that is uproarious, wild, or causes uproar (perhaps with a spangled coat or markings).