The 17-line
children's poem opens with: Subsequent lines also use nonsensical
onomatopoeia—like teapots going "Jibber Jabber Joo"—to create a silly imaginative world, until the narrator finally laments "What a noisy place to belong / Is the Ning Nang Ning Nang Nong". In the collection of poetry chosen by children,
I Like This Poem, one child said they enjoyed it "because the animals say different things to what they really say". Drawing on this comment, Rod McGillis says the poem reflects children's inherent love for noise and their affinity for the absurd and unexpected; it allows them to play with sounds without needing to make sense. Michael Heyman calls
Silly Verse for Kids a revival of the
nonsense verse of Victorian poets like
Edward Lear and
Lewis Carroll, and says that the
nonsense is complemented by silly illustrations by Milligan shown beside the poems. "On the Ning Nang Nong" uses
nonsense words to create a strong, comedic rhythm, emphasising the sound of the poem when read aloud over meaning. According to the book
Silliness: A Serious History, the nonsense words chosen are uncomplicated and could easily be made up by children, creating a sense of identification with the poem. The poem also makes use of
alliteration and simple rhymes, resulting in a
tongue twister effect.'''''' Structurally, the poem is composed of two halves of eight lines separated by the central line "And you just can't catch 'em when they do!" (referring to mice that go clang). The
rhyme scheme and
metre shift in the second half of the poem with the lines beginning to "scurry away from the central line", which McGillis interprets as "formal proof" that "you just can't catch 'em when they do!" == Publication and reception ==