The Sheila Variations

Happy birthday, Edward Lear

Edward Lear (the so-called "father of nonsense") was born today in 1812 in London.

I could recite from memory a lot of his stuff when I was pretty close to this age here. The Golden Book of Poetry was so read in our family that the cover faded to almost nothing, the binding fell apart ... and I can still, in my mind's eye, see all of the illustrations - and where they were placed on the page. And most of the poem's, when I read them now, I hear them in my father's gravelly voice. (The photo at the top of this post is me, "candidly" posing with the Golden Book of Poetry.) "The Owl and the Pussy-cat" is still a favorite. Look how the verse just rocks and sings. It's perfect.

The Owl and the Pussy-cat - by Edward Lear

I
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
'O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!'

II
Pussy said to the Owl, 'You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?'
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

III
'Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?' Said the Piggy, 'I will.'
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

Michael Schmidt, in his book "Lives of the Poets" writes that Lear, and Lewis Carroll (Lear's younger peer) wrote "nonsense verse" which "strays into the musical zones that Longfellow mapped with his self-propelling meters."

-- the inventor of the term "snail mail" in this whimsical letter to Evelyn Baring? The letter itself reads, along the twists of the snail shell:

Feb. 19. 1864 Dear Baring Please give the enclosed noat to Sir Henry - (which I had just written:-& say that I shall have great pleasure in coming on Sunday. I have sent your 2 vols of Hood to Wade Brown. Many thanks for lending them to me - which they have delighted me eggstreamly Yours sincerely

"Don't tell me of a man's being able to talk sense; every one can talk sense. Can he talk nonsense?" -- William Pitt

In regard to his verses, Lear asserted that "nonsense, pure and absolute," was his aim throughout; and remarked, further, that to have been the means of administering innocent mirth to thousands was surely a just excuse for satisfaction. He pursued his aim with scrupulous consistency, and his absurd conceits are fantastic and ridiculous, but never cheaply or vulgarly funny. -- Carolyn Wells

However, there are subtler methods of debunking than throwing custard pies. There is also the humour of pure fantasy, which assaults man's notion of himself as not only a dignified but a rational being. Lewis Carroll's humour consists essentially in making fun of logic, and Edward Lear's in a sort of poltergeist interference with common sense. When the Red Queen remarks, "I've seen hills compared with which you'd call that one a valley", she is in her way attacking the bases of society as violently as Swift or Voltaire. Comic verse, as in Lear's poem "The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò", often depends on building up a fantastic universe which is just similar enough to the real universe to rob it of its dignity. But more often it depends on anticlimax -- that is, on starting out with a high-flown language and then suddenly coming down with a bump. -- George Orwell, "Funny But Not Vulgar"

From Michael Sala, "Lear's Nonsense":
Edward Lear, a skillful illustrator of science books (botany, zoology), started his literary career by chance. As a matter of fact, "most of Lear's limericks were not written with publication in mind, but rather as gifts for specific children" (Rieder 1998: 50). He was persuaded toward their publication by the enthusiastic reaction of his young audience.

There was an old person of Rimini
Who said, "Gracious! Goodness! O Gimini!
When they said, "Please be still!" she ran down a hill
And was never once heard of at Rimini.

There was an old person of Sestri
Who sat himself down in the vestry,
When they said "You are wrong!" - he merely said "Bong!"
That repulsive old person of Sestri.

This is a typical example of Lear's limericks, and a perfect example of what is intended by nonsense, that is to say, "language lifted out of context, language turning on itself [a] language made hermetic, opaque" (Stewars 1979: 3), language that "resists contextualization, so that it refers to 'nothing' instead of to the word's commonsense designation [and] refusing to work as conventional communication " (Rieder 1998: 49). In other words, what happened to the old person of Rimini? What is wrong with the person of Sestri? It is impossible to answer, because, despite the perfectly grammatical use of the words, they don't tell much. They are just bizarrely arranged so as to sound appealing. If there is a shadow of a story, usually it is nothing more than that: only a shadow of a story (without causes or consequences). In Lear's limericks, words introduce "a number of possibilities, including dangerous and violent ones, and at the same time disconnect those possibilities from the real world, that is, from what goes on after the game is over" (Rieder 1996: 49).

'My dear child, I'm sure we shall be allowed to laugh in Heaven!'" --from a letter to a little girl he knew

In the limericks [. . .] to an extent difficult for us now to imagine, Lear offered children the liberation of unaffected high spirits [. . .]. Here are grown-ups doing silly things, the kind of things grown-ups never do [. . .]. for all their incongruity, there is in the limericks a truth which is lacking in the improving literature of the time. In an age when children were loaded with shame, Lear attempted to free them from it. -- Vivien Noakes

Like the limericks, they celebrate the outsider. Their principal characters are socially unacceptable" --Susan Chitty on Lear's ballads.

Mr. Lear was delighted when I showed to him that this couple [the Owl and the Pussy-cat] were reviving the old law of Solon, that the Athenian bride and bridegroom eat a quince together at their wedding -- Sir Edward Strachey

More information on Edward Lear here.

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