There’s a riddle that’s been rattling around in my head lately, and it comes from a possum.
More precisely, it comes from the possum’s creator — a man named Walt Kelly, one of the great comic geniuses of the twentieth century, who spent twenty-six years filling the pages of American newspapers with the inhabitants of Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp. Kelly could be hilarious, savage, haunting, and absurd, often in the same panel. But every now and then he’d drop a little verse that stopped you cold — not because it was confusing, but because it wasn’t.
Here’s the one that’s been following me around:
—
Riddle you the little dew
And little do you do?
Little did is little done,
Tho’ little did’ll do.
—
Read it once. Read it again. Let “did’ll” do its quiet work on you.
That invented contraction — did’ll, a collision of “did” and “will” that no dictionary has ever acknowledged and no one seems to want to argue with — is pure Kelly. He coined it like he coined everything: by feel, by sound, by a backwoods Southern logic that makes perfect sense as long as you don’t examine it too closely.
And what does the poem say? Something like: if you’ve done very little, well… very little will do. It’s a defense of idleness so elegant it almost sounds like wisdom.
## Who Was This Guy?
Walt Kelly (1913–1973) had one of those careers that seems made up. He started as a crime reporter, pivoted to Disney — where he worked on Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Dumbo — then landed at Dell Comics before inventing Pogo, which launched on October 4, 1948 in the New York Star and went nationally syndicated the following year.
Pogo ran for twenty-six years and was set entirely in the Okefenokee Swamp, populated by a gloriously eccentric cast: Pogo the gentle, philosophically bewildered possum; Albert the alligator, blusterous and lovable; Howland Owl, who was very confident and almost always wrong; Churchy La Femme, the turtle with a song in his heart and disaster in his wake.
Kelly won the Reuben Award — Cartoonist of the Year — in 1951. He was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1995. Critic Brad Leithauser, writing in the New York Review of Books in 2002, called Pogo “the only comic strip spun through the mind of a poet” and compared Kelly’s verse to Theodore Roethke, E.E. Cummings, and Walter de la Mare.
That’s the company. Kelly was earning it.
## A Man Who Invented Words for Fun
Kelly wrote in a dialect that didn’t quite exist anywhere — a backwoods Southern patois stirred together with malapropisms, neologisms, and words he simply invented on the spot. Incredibobble. Hysteriwockle. Sentences that alliterate and rhyme and tumble over themselves and somehow land upright.
Here’s his annual Christmas carol, “Deck Us All with Boston Charlie,” which appeared in Pogo every December:
Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an’ Kalamazoo!
Nora’s freezin’ on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley’garoo!
It means nothing. It is perfect.
Or consider “Slopposition,” which is either political commentary or a beautiful nonsense machine or both:
Oh, once the opposition was completely opposed
To all the supposition that was generally supposed
But now the superstitions that were thought to be imposed
Are seen by composition to be slightly decomposed
Kelly could also, when he wanted, be genuinely devastating. In 1953, right in the middle of McCarthyism’s worst fever, Kelly introduced “Simple J. Malarkey” into the strip — a shotgun-wielding bobcat who was unmistakably Senator Joe McCarthy — and let the swamp deal with him accordingly. It was brave, funny, and dangerous.
And then, in 1970, he gave us the line that outlasted everything else: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” It was written for an Earth Day poster, riffing on Commodore Perry’s 1813 dispatch from the War of 1812. It became one of the most quoted phrases of the twentieth century, and it came from a possum in a swamp.
## But About That Riddle
“Little did is little done, Tho’ little did’ll do.”
In 1948, this was a gentle joke about idleness. A swamp observation. A shrug dressed up as philosophy.
In 2026, with AI cheerfully drafting our emails, summarizing our meetings, writing our code, researching our questions, and occasionally generating our blog posts — it hits a little differently.
If AI does the work, and the work gets done, and “little did’ll do”… are we headed toward a world where Kelly’s verse is not a joke but a job description?
I don’t think Kelly meant it as dystopia. He meant it the way a turtle means things: warmly, a little sideways, with a rhyme at the end. The Okefenokee wasn’t a place of ambition. It was a place of being, where Pogo could sit on a log and notice things and that was enough.
Maybe that’s not a bad model. Maybe the question the AI era is quietly asking us — while it handles the “did” — is what we actually want to do. What we’d do if “little did’ll do” really did do.
Kelly didn’t answer that. He just wrote the poem and handed it to a possum.
Seems about right.
—
Walt Kelly (August 25, 1913 – October 18, 1973) created Pogo for the New York Star in 1948. The strip ran in syndication for twenty-six years. His collected works include Songs of the Pogo (1956) and many other volumes. “We have met the enemy and he is us” appears on a poster he designed for the first Earth Day.