Comic Crescendo

Since we're all not music majors here, allow us to explain. A crescendo occurs in music when the sound grows, building in force and volume, until the music just feels ready to just burst. The Internet tells us that Crescendo is also a movie produced by Justin Bieber's mom, so just to be clear, we're talking about the first crescendo, not the second.

We call Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose a comic crescendo because the tone of the story is comic, but like a crescendo, this tone starts off slow and then builds in its intensity and force. The poetic meter picks up speed while the absurdity of poor Thidwick's situation grows ever more, well, absurd.

Check it out. The first stanza of the poem starts:

Up at Lake Winna-Bango… the far northern shore…
Lives a huge herd of moose, about sixty or more (1.1-2)

Those ellipses (that would be the …) keep the reader from blazing through this passage. The scene of moose munching moose-moss is peaceful; the reading is calm. But then things start to pick up:

They asked in a fox, who jumped in from the trees,
They asked in some mice and they asked in some fleas.
They asked in a big bear in and then, if you please,
Came a swarm of three hundred and sixty-two bees! (35.1-4)

Read those lines aloud, and you'll see they read at a much quicker pace than the ones above. It's no coincidence that they express a scene of LOL proportions. Come on, it's a moose with a bear on its head. Then, as the story reaches its finale, the tone really picks up:

Up canyon! Off cliff! Over wild rocky trail!
With bullets band-bouncing around him like hail!
Up gully! Through gulch! And down slippery sluice,
With his hard-hearted guests raced the soft-hearted moose! (40.1-4)

Just look at all those exclamation points! They really ratchet up the intensity!!! Also, the short and not-quite-complete sentences force you to read the poem faster than the ellipses from the first stanza. As readers, we are moving at chase-speed, just as the ridiculousness of it all hits fever pitch.

We don't want to give away the ending here, but it all leads to a joke that, for once, isn't at Thidwick's expense.