Not one riddle in "Some Riddles" gets an answer. Mary F. C. Pratt packs ten questions into three quatrains and then stops, leaving the reader in the doorway with a handful of unfinished jokes. That is the poem's trick, and its point. A riddle is usually a closed little box with a punchline inside, but here the boxes are all open and empty, and the reader has to decide what, if anything, belongs in them.
For most of the poem the questions have the sound of riddles without the substance. "What is yellow and never stops talking?" has the rhythm of a joke you have heard before, though no answer is coming. "What color is a hippopotenuse?" is a smaller, sharper piece of mischief. The made-up word seems to fuse "hippopotamus" with "hypotenuse," the longest side of a right triangle, and the question then asks for the color of something that, in geometry, has no color at all. The humor lies in a category mistake delivered with a straight face. Other lines work by odd particularity. A walrus in the rain, a granny speaking to a lion, and elephants who need a special place to sneeze are all small cartoons, each too specific to be random and too strange to explain. The fishmonger who writes a sonnet is a quiet gem, since it sets the smell and bustle of a fish stall against one of poetry's most polished forms.
The most inventive line may be "If it's a Tuesday in April, who hid the cheese?" The opening clause borrows the tone of a detective fixing an alibi, so the cheese becomes the object of a crime. The mock precision of a named day and month makes the nonsense funnier, because it is so sure of itself.
The sound of the poem keeps this foolishness under control. The lines are roughly the same length and have a bouncing, nursery-rhyme beat, with stresses that gallop through "What did the granny say to the lion?" The rhyme scheme loosens and tightens as the poem goes on. In the first two stanzas only the second and fourth lines rhyme (train/rain, then sneeze/cheese), so the first and third lines drift free, like loose ends. The final stanza rhymes in an interlocking pattern: "motion" with "notion," "sky" with "fly." The poem sounds more complete exactly when it is about to hand the work over to us.
That last stanza also changes the mood. "Can Earth revolve yet make no motion?" sounds like another nonsense riddle, but it is closer to a real puzzle, because we do ride a turning planet without feeling it move. The chicken singing to the sky may remind some readers of the old tale of a chicken afraid the sky is falling, though the poem never says so. Then comes "Knock, knock," the opening of a standard joke in which the listener is supposed to answer "Who's there?" Pratt reverses the roles. The speaker invites us in with "Come in, if you've a notion," and asks us to supply what the poem will not. The clipped full stops in "Knock, knock. Come in," slow the pace and make the invitation sound almost like a stage direction.
The final line, "and tell me specifically: how does time fly?", turns the jokes inward. "Time flies" is a stock phrase, so worn that we rarely picture anything flying. Asking how it happens makes a cliché strange again, and it is the one question in the poem that may have no comic answer. The word "specifically" is long and a little pompous, and it echoes the fussy exactness of the Tuesday in April. By then the pretend precision is no longer only a joke. Someone really wants to know.
The poem's significance lies in this shift from play to wonder. It shows that nonsense and curiosity are close relatives, since both begin by asking why things are the way they are. By withholding every answer, "Some Riddles" suggests that the asking is the part worth keeping, and it hands the last word to the reader.