A trip to the zoo usually sounds like a one-way arrangement: people stand outside, animals sit inside, and the looking goes in a single direction. Mary Carolyn Davies's "Let's Go Visiting" quietly turns that arrangement upside down. In eight short lines, she suggests that a zoo visit is really an exchange, and that the monkeys have as much right to stare at us as we have to stare at them.
The turn comes in the first stanza, and it comes with a small, playful interruption. The speaker begins by saying "We like to see the way they look / Within their home, the zoo," then pauses to wonder whether the animals might feel the same way: "Perhaps they like (Why shouldn't they?) / To see how we look, too!" That parenthetical is the heart of the poem. It sounds like a thought that has just occurred to the speaker mid-sentence, and the question "Why shouldn't they?" has a child's blunt logic. There is no argument being made here, only a simple fairness: if looking is fun, it should be fun for everyone.
One word deserves special attention: "home." The speaker calls the zoo the animals' "home," not their cage or their enclosure. Whether or not the poem means to be political about this (and it seems far too light-hearted for that), the choice shifts the balance of power. If the zoo is the monkeys' home, then the visitors are guests, and the title makes this explicit. "Visiting" is what you do when you call on someone, politely, at their house. The humans are not an audience at a show; they are callers who ought to mind their manners.
The poem's construction is tidy and bouncy. Each stanza has four lines, alternating a longer line with a shorter one, and the rhymes fall on the second and fourth lines: "zoo" with "too" in the first stanza, "see" with "me" in the second. These are simple, sturdy rhymes, the kind a young reader can hear coming, which gives the poem the feel of a skipping chant. The rhythm is light and walking-paced, and the exclamation marks at the ends of both stanzas keep the energy high, as though the speaker is already tugging a friend's sleeve toward the monkey house.
The second stanza turns the idea into action: "So let's go see the monkeys / And let the monkeys see." The repetition of "see" does a lot of work, and so does the grammar. "Let's go see" is something we do; "let the monkeys see" is something we allow. The verb "let" quietly treats the monkeys as equals who can be granted a privilege, or perhaps as an audience whose attention we are inviting. The sentence loops back on itself, much as the poem's idea does: watching and being watched become the same activity.
The final two lines supply the payoff and the joke. After the abstract talk of "they" and "we," the poem ends on a list of names: "Margery, Mehitabel, / Marian, and me!" The four M's chime together, and the sudden specificity is charming. We have been picturing a vague crowd of humans, and now we meet a little band of named friends, each one presumably worth a monkey's curiosity. Putting "me" last, tucked in with the others, gives the ending a modest, giggling humility. The speaker is not the star of the visit but one of the sights.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much perspective it packs into so little space. It never lectures, and it never explains what it wants us to learn, yet it leaves behind a lasting shift: the next time we press up to the glass, we might notice something looking back. The idea of reversing the gaze is a surprisingly sophisticated one, and Davies delivers it in the plainest language, with the cheerful confidence of a child who has just realized that the monkeys have eyes too.