Is Miss Gee Ultimately A Comical Poem?

In many ways, Miss Gee can be interpreted as a comical poem. Auden sustains a light hearted tone throughout, the traditional ABCB rhyming scheme imitates the format of a nursery rhyme providing a childish and facetious feel. The reader may also find Miss Gee’s inappropriate dream, implying her squalid, sexual encounters with the vicar comical. However, it could be argued Auden has used this light hearted, humorous tone to emphasise the harshness of the judgemental and uncaring society and make the audience question themselves for cruelly laughing at her unfortunate demise.
At first glance, when reading the poem, the reader would not suspect it to lead to her death, with almost horrific details of the surgeon’s butchering dissections. This is due to the light hearted, nursery rhyme like tone through Auden’s use of short rhyming lines with heavy description of Miss Gee’s appearance. ‘She had a squint in her left eye / Her lips they were thin and small’. The descriptions give Miss Gee a ‘cartoon-esque’ impression and again make her and the overall poem appear quite comical. The fifteenth stanza, on line 59, ‘O, doctor, I’ve a pain inside of me’ although not a humorous line in itself, imitates the structure of the infamous ‘doctor, doctor’ jokes, making Miss Gee’s illness almost laughable.
Many would argue and say that the blunt lines do not make the poem come across as funny, but uncomfortable and give the reader a sense of unease. Miss Gee’s abrupt and casual death, ‘He cut Miss Gee in half’, accentuates the cruelty of society and how uncaring the surgeons were. The ‘students who begin to laugh’ at her whilst she’s in a vulnerable position are also examples of how Miss Gee is treated by society. The ‘loving couples’ she passes who don’t ‘ask her to stay’ are further examples of her being shunned by humanity, making the