The Little Peach by Eugene Field

It's both, but the comedy is the main focus. Field is parodying the Victorian cautionary tale—a genre that often used children's deaths to convey moral lessons. The playful rhyme scheme and exaggerated expressions of grief like "Boo hoo!" clearly show that Field is poking fun at that tradition rather than genuinely engaging with it.

Probably not quite as the poem suggests, though unripe peaches can definitely upset your stomach. The seeds (or pits) of peaches contain amygdalin, which can release cyanide, but you'd need to eat a lot for it to be harmful. Field is exaggerating for comedic effect — the children's death feels absurd and over-the-top, rather than medically accurate.

"Mon Dieu" translates to "My God" in French—an expression of shock or dismay. Field employs it (along with the closing "Adieu!") to lend the narrator a theatrical, slightly pompous flair, as if he’s acting out his outrage instead of truly experiencing it. The use of these French phrases introduces a humorous contrast to the otherwise straightforward, American folk-tale style of the poem.

Every stanza sticks to the same rhyme sound (-ew) across all four lines — this technique is known as monorhyme. This strictness contributes to the humor. By the third or fourth stanza, readers can sense the poem struggling to maintain the rhyme, and that struggle adds to the comedic effect. It also imparts a relentless, mechanical feel that reflects the narrator's upbeat indifference towards the children's fate.

By concluding with the peach instead of the children, Field positions the fruit as the true main character of the story. The phrase "Its mission on earth is through" carries a dark humor—suggesting that the peach had a purpose that it achieved by causing the deaths of two kids. The "Adieu!" serves as a sarcastic goodbye to the peach, diverting any residual feelings about the children's deaths back to the fruit.

Field clearly wrote it for adults who would get the parody. The topic — children dying — is treated so casually that it would probably confuse young readers instead of making them laugh. Still, the poem has been included in children’s collections over the years, likely because it resembles a nursery rhyme on the surface, even though the humor is really for adults.

Field was part of a tradition of comic and nonsense verse that includes Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll in Britain. In American literature, he drew inspiration from the newspaper humorists of his time. The cautionary-tale parody he's presenting here also recalls Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter (1845), a German collection of darkly humorous stories about children who meet unfortunate fates.

On the surface, the moral is "don't eat unripe fruit." But Field is actually poking fun at the notion that poems must have morals. The death occurs so quickly, is described so casually, and feels so excessive compared to the offense that the poem doesn't serve as a true lesson. The real takeaway is that the cautionary-tale genre is somewhat absurd — and Field aims to make you laugh at it.