To A Hotel Keeper

This is a classic of English comic verse, a perfectly constructed joke in poetic form. When a telegram declaring "Crossed wires, to a hotel keeper, send your wife home at once" arrives at the wrong destination, the consequences spiral into beautiful chaos. A hotel keeper receives a message clearly meant for another man, misreads its meaning entirely, and launches into a dramatic confrontation that escalates magnificently. Crosland builds the tension with expert timing, each stanza adding another layer of misunderstanding until the entire hotel is in an uproar. The poem captures the absurdity of miscommunication amplified by the new technology of the telegraph, and the eternal human tendency to assume the worst. It remains one of the most widely anthologized humorous poems in the English language, a small masterpiece of comic timing and wordplay that has been making readers laugh for over a century.