Nonsense Verse and the Child

Elizabeth Sewell

The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 4, Number 2, Winter 1980-1981, pp. 30-48
(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/uni.0.0225

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/243746

Access provided by University of South Dakota (1 Jul 2018 13:04 GMT)

30

Nonsense Verse and the Child

Elizabeth Sewell

No sooner is such a title chosen and penned than there comes an

immediate sense of misgiving: those are two entities very slippery
to deal with. Nonsense verse is not too readily distinguishable
from epigram, satire, parody, wit, and humor, while children,
mysterious creatures, come in all shapes, sizes, and skins,
including one's own. Not wanting to meddle with experts on
literary genres, nor, let us say, with pedagogues and Piagets, I
shall assume a rough plan by which to work—that there is a child
in each one of us, and that Nonsense is what appeals to that
audience. Ruled out by this would be the element of parody in
"You are old, Father William," the sharp but adult fun of seeing
Southey's blah piety mocked; included would be the pleasure of
contemplating Father William incessantly standing on his head.
Similarly, in a rhyme Edward Lear confided to his diary,1 the
adult might enjoy knowing the contents of the "large volume"
mentioned (again perhaps because of a sense of irreverence, of
taking liberties), but the child's pleasure, in adult and child alike,
will lie elsewhere:

There was an old man with a ribbon,

Who found a large volume of Gibbon,
Which he tied to his nose.
And said: 1 suppose
This is quite the best use for my ribbon.

So let each indicate other. Child shall be that which in each of us,
regardless of age, responds to Nonsense verse; Nonsense shall be
that to which this child responds.
This child ... "And so ends 1868—a year of much weariness,
doubt, change, pain,—yet, or I am mistaken,— of some good
effects on this child." So writes Lear, of himself, to himself, in his
diary, at the age of fifty-six.2 He speaks of himself in this fashion
 Nonsense Verse and the Child 31

over and over again, and it must express, beneath a façon de

parler, something of what he considered himself truly to be—
helpful for us to notice, perhaps, since he will be the main ground
of our inquiry here.
I am choosing him because of a question about the nature of
Nonsense which rose up before two fellow-students3 and meas we
studied Lear's work a month or so ago. Lewis Carroll has
accompanied my thoughts for many years, but it is a long time
since I worked on that other, "laureate of all nonsense poets," as a
critic in the Spectator dubbed him in 1887. As part of a refresher
course I made the acquaintance of William B. Osgood Field's
Edward Lear on my Shelves—a huge rewarding book, not to be
tied to one's nose—and also happened upon a small anthology of
Nonsense verse for children, Oh, What Nonsense,4 whose editor,
William Cole, decided to omit Lear and Carroll as already well
known, and so provided a useful small field of other examples for
this inquiry.
Now for the question. We three students, watching our
reactions to Lear's limericks, asked one another: "How is it that
on reading these, one says that one limerick is better than
another?" This is Nonsense we are dealing with. What is "better"
or "worse" Nonsense? I do not mean to dogmatize nor to suggest
that we should agree upon categories, say, of weak, middling
good, and excellent. But how do we judge at all? How does the
child know? For plainly there is a scale of value, of some
instinctive sort, underneath this assessment, and it arouses my
curiosity mightily.
An example or two seems needed at this point. Since the less
familiar is often easier to think about than the thoroughly
familiar, suppose we start with three stanzas from the Mad
Gardener's Song which are scattered through Carroll's Sylvie and
Bruno books, its form as tight and symmetrical as any limerick.
This is how I would rank them on that threefold scale:
32 Elizabeth Sewell

Weak- He thought he saw a Rattlesnake

That questioned him in Greek:
He looked again, and found it was
The Middle of Next Week.
'The one thing I regret', he said,
'Is that it cannot speak!'

Middling He thought he saw a Coach-and-Four

good— That stood beside his bed:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bear without a Head.

'Poor thing!' he said, 'poor silly thing,

'It's waiting to be fed!'

Excellent— He thought he saw an Argument

That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bar of Mottled Soap.
Ά fact so dread', he faintly said,
'Extinguishes all hope!'

Turning next to Lear's limericks, I propose again to take some

that may be less well-known than the classic two hundred and
twelve which figure in the collections of 1846 and 1872. The
following examples are quoted in Edward Lear on my Shelves,
some of them later published inTeapots and Quails5 in 1954.
Each limerick in this group, dealing respectively with the
inhabitants of New York, Compton, Kildare, Diss, Harrow,
Twickenham, Brussels, Cheam, Carlisle, the hills, Bradley,
Girgenti, and Iowa, is accompanied as usual by its illustration,
and that makes decisons about them rather more complex, for,
should the words falter, the drawing may give enough delight to
sweep all before it.

Weak— There was an old man of New York

Who murdered himself with a fork;
But nobody cried, though he very soon died,
For that silly old man of New York.
 Nonsense Verse and the Child 33

That is an unfair example in a way, for Lear himself withdrew it,

with one or two rhymes, from later editions.

Middling There was an old person of Cheam,

good— Who said, "It is just like a dream,
"When I play on the drum, and wear rings
on my thumb,
In the beautiful meadows of Cheam!"

Excellent— There was an old person of Diss,

Who said, "It is this! It is this!"
When they said, "What? or which?"—Hejumped
into a ditch,
Which absorbed that old person of Diss.

And there it goes, the secret of the universe, lost forever.

Two of the limericks in this group, the old man of Carlisle and
the old person of Bradley, are printed opposite one another on the
pages of Teapots and Quails, and a closer look at them, verse and
drawing, may be helpful. In this illustration (Fig. 1) the rotund but
nimble body of the ex-Carlislean is admirable, but better still is his
facial expression, that blend of complacency and intense
absorption which one sees on children's faces when they dance.
(The old person of Filey who"danced perfectly well, to the sound
of a bell" wears a rather similar look.) This must be why we were
always instructed to "Smile!" as we danced. The verse, however,
eating cakes and living with dancing snakes, seems lackluster.
Turn now to the old person of Bradley (Fig. 2). Here the words
wobble—that "all so" looks like straight filler to pad out the line—
yet poem and drawing together nearly convince me that they
belong in the class "Excellent." The delight seems to come from
the combining of "loud" and "sad" and the sheer weight of what he
waves around in his hands—so energetic a lugubriousness. There
is less actual disorder in this limerick than in the former, only a
slight and more subtle shift, as if that in itself might make for
better Nonsense (but what is "better" Nonsense?) Nonetheless the
same point seems to be borne out by another of these limericks:
34 Elizabeth Sewell
Nonsense Verse and the Child 35
36 Elizabeth Sewell

There was an old person of Harrow

Who bought a mahogany barrow.
For he said to his wife,
"You're the joy of my life!
"And I'll wheel you all day
in this barrow!"

It is the mahogany barrow that does it there, so slight a shift into

so delicious an incongruity.
I am well aware that I am explaining nothing by these words—
incongruity, nonsense, shift, disorder—and we shall return to
them later. For the moment, let us see if some of the more modern
productions in Oh, What Nonsense can throw any light on our
question.
One striking thing about this collection is the number of well-
known "straight" people who write Nonsense. Or should I say:
well-known men? Female Nonsense writers are very few.
Appearing here are D'Arcy Thompson, Theodore Roethke, John
Ciardi; in fact the best thing in the book is "Sir Smasham Uppe"
by E.V. Rieu, and 1 want to add, "of all people," the translator of
the Gospels into simple and beautiful English, though Sir
Smasham may really be adult's rather than child's Nonsense in his
trial of havoc through a polite tea-party, porcelain tea-cups,
windows, objets d'art:
A chair—allow me, sir!.. .Great Scott!
That was a nasty smash! Eh, what?
Oh, not at all: the chair was old-
Queen Anne, or so we have been told.

This and Roethke's "Dirty Dinky," a version of the classic

Cautionary Tale, carry energy and conviction:

Last night you lay a-sleeping? No!

The room was thirty-five below;
The sheets and blankets turned to snow.
— He'd got in: Dirty Dinky.

What also may strike the reader here is how derivative much of
 Nonsense Verse and the Child 37

this Nonsense is. An extended tale of an old lady tidying up the

seashore seems to grow right out of "The Walrus and the
Carpenter." The suggestion of a hippo as a desirable house-pet
sends one back to Hilaire Belloc's Yak in The Bad Child's Book of
Beasts from the twenties. Using one's long nose as a flute recalls
Lear's old man of West Dumpet, and you can infer how that
limerick, and its drawing, go. And so on.
I used the word "derivative" in this regard, as if Nonsense
should strive to be original; but perhaps there are only so many
ideas in Nonsense—platonic forms of what might be called a
nonsense universe—of which these are examples. We should be
able to run these through fairly quickly, with examples from Oh,
What Nonsense. First, simple inversion or upside-down-turning:
They only eat the apple peeling.
And take their walks upon the ceiling.

Next, verbally induced contradiction:

... As a barefoot boy with shoes on

Stood, sitting on the grass

a procedure one remembers from traditional childhood rhymes

such as: "Three children sliding on the ice/ Upon a summer's
day..." Next, rhyme, the gift of a particular language in providing
««fitting pairs. Antelope-canteloupe, vanilla-sarsaparilla occur
here, paralleling Lear's cakes and snakes; Roethke makes use of
blizzard-lizard-gizzard as Calverley did in part too, and one
remembers that play upon Plato-potato which Bryon and W. S.
Gilbert offer us. Next, disproportion: "A grasshopper stepped on
an elephant's toe," associated with which comes hyperbole. The
nose elongating into a flute belongs here, and we return to Lear's
verses, for this is one of his strong lines:

There was a young lady of Firle,

Whose hair was addicted to curl.
It curled up a tree, and all over the sea...
38 Elizabeth Sewell

Last and most important, central to Lear and to Nonsense asa

whole, is the maneuver I am going to call "muddling things up."
The Oh, What Nonsense volume, of which we can now take our
leave, provides examples in plenty: rice pudding in a sock,
painting one's toes alternately black and white, a flying cow in a
porkpie hat. This is the very stuff of Nonsense, and with it we
come back to the puzzle of "weak-middling good-excellent." Mere
muddle as such does not necessarily enchant the attentive child we
are thinking about. The form which Lear devised for a late
Nonsense work of his, included in Teapots and Quails, with four
"muddled" objects in the first two lines and a repetitive last
couplet, does not work well. Examples are:

Ribands and Pigs,

Helmets and Figs ...

Eagles and pears,

Slippers and Bears ...

Rainbows and Wives,

Puppies and Hives ...

This is similar to what Carroll is doing in refrains such as: "Sing

Cats, sing Corks, sing Cowslip-tea!" (though he has added
alliteration) in Sylvie and Bruno Concluded, and it too seems
uninspired.
Yet when this device works, whatever that means, it shines forth
as one of Nonsense's chief glories:

But they said, 'If you choose,

To boil eggs in your shoes.
You shall never remain in Thermopylae.'

He weeps by the side of the ocean;

He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.
 Nonsense Verse and the Child 39

What makes the difference?

It reminds me of a childhood experience of my own. I was about
seven and fortunate to have been given anthologies of classic
poems, to make of them what I could. I could say that already
some seemed to me magical, some not. One line, "We take the
Golden Road to Samarkand," beguiled me all that summer. I had
looked at Blake's "The Lamb" and "The Tyger" and opted firmly
for the latter. The fact of power in certain arrangements of words
was clear to me, though not the reason for it. (I realize that is still
largely true.) This particular reminiscence has to do with one short
lyric, Tennyson's "The splendour falls on castle walls." First verse
is wonderful, I said to myself: read on. But.. .whatever happens in
the second? "O hark, O hear! how thin and clear," and indeed it
did seem thin and getting thinner as the lines ran on, despite
fleeting pleasure at the phrase "purple glens." And so to verse
three which just faded out completely. I was left with a sense of
disbelief, as if I had seen something and had then watched it
vanish. Where did it go? And what is /7?
I have used the words "power" and "magic," but I am afraid a
harder word is needed. I think it is Beauty, in poetry and Nonsense
alike. Now truly one may have those misgivings again. Does that
high presence, that Idea, belong with Nonsense? Speaking for
myself, I can say we are not accustomed to thinking so.
A first step may be to get some of Lear's critics, even the
appreciative ones, out of the way, for they may have misled us.
Some samples of what I mean: "It would be difficult to give to a
'non-sequitur' greater charms than these" {Athenaeum, 1876); "it
is the special pride of the Nonsense Epigram that it has no sting or
point at all" {Examiner, 1876); "no nonsense is so absolutely
devoid of'arriere-pensee' as that of Mr. Lear, none so refreshingly
destitute of sense or probability" {Spectator, 1887).6 Then there is
Sewell, 1952,7 speaking of "odd assemblages of elements.. .in-
congruity of the thing-series."
Inconsequence, pointlessness, senselessness, incongruity—all
negatives, we notice, and they lead us to equate Nonsense with dis-
order. The comments also carry almost a quantitative
40 Elizabeth Sewell

implication, as if more extreme Nonsense, however that might be

judged, would give greater delight. But "the more disorder, the
more delight" is as difficult a phrase to give meaning to as was
"better Nonsense." (I am not sure that negatives are subject to
degrees of comparison in any case.) A phrase used by Lady
Macbeth—strange Muse for Nonsense, I must say—comes to my
mind here: "a most admired disorder." I am twisting it from its
original sense, but there is the heart of the problem. Why should
one disorder be admired as against another? The next step is to ask
whether we admire or take delight in disorder at all. If we do doubt
that this is the case, then what attracts the child in Nonsense may
be not senselessness or incongruity but something else.
A suggestion that this may indeed be so, inside Nonsense itself,
comes to light in an essay by Benjamin Whorf, "Language, Mind
and Reality."8 He is talking about the apparently chaotic
Nonsense words which embellish the work of Lear, Carroll and
others from time to time, words such as tulgy or scroobious or
Tishnar sootli maltmahee which is a line from Walter de la Mare's
"Marching Song" in The Three Royal Monkeys. By a fairly
complex equation Whorf demonstrates that such words are not
leaps into chaos, doing so in part by inventing Nonsense words of
a kind which an English-speaking Nonsense writer will not
produce, words such as ngib, zih, fpat, nwelng, dzogb. "Any
budding Lewis Carrolls or Edward Lears will somehow
mysteriously refuse to coin such words," he avers and draws the
conclusion: "word-coining is no act of unfettered imagination,
even in the wildest flights of nonsense, but a strict use of already
patterned materials" (p. 265 ff.).
Throughout the essay he speaks to us of those patterns—of
letters, sounds, grammatical categories, syntactical organiza-
tion—which our native language imposes on us, inexorably and
invisibly: we then in accordance with them proceed to pattern the
universe in that way, to think of it as absolute and to call that
"Truth." Despite his interesting passing reference to Nonsense
and its classic practitioners, Whorf is concerned with science and
metaphysics and the urgent need, here and now, for apprehension
 Nonsense Verse and the Child 41

of "a noumenal world" which "awaits discovery by all the

sciences... awaits discovery under its first aspect of a realm of
PATTERNED RELATIONS, inconceivably manifold" (p. 248).
The re-patterning required for the new vision to be perceived, he
says, works upwards, admitting us to higher orders (he expresses
much of his thought in terms of series, hierarchies, planes, levels)
and downwards, where language is "specialized in a different way
in order to make available a different type of force manifestation,
by re-patterning states in the nervous system and glands" (p. 250).
Later (p. 267) he adds that to produce awareness on lower planes
than its own indicates a power of the order of magic.
Network overlaying and sliding upon network, correspond-
ences between patterns in the brain and those in the various orders
and levels of the universe—Whorf, writing forty years ago cites
Ouspensky and Whitehead, where we might flash a glance,
somewhat vertiginously no doubt, at scientific thinkers such as
Prigogine and Pribram. But now if we can simplify this and bring
it down to our own level, perhaps this is what Nonsense in its turn
does: produce by re-patterning of letters in a word or of objects in
a seemingly given universe, a dislocation of that given and then a
re-location which, slight as it is, may yet permit glimpses of just
such other orders beyond and through our usual perspectives.
Nonsense may give delight in proportion as it makes possible such
glimpses. So too may poetry. This hypothesis at least gives us
some explanation for the sense of some Nonsense being better
than other. The slight shift which accords a different vision comes
close to Emily Dickinson's description of how she recognized
poetry, as a chill all over the body, or a sense that the top of one's
head had blown away—the perceptible shock which is the body-
mind's response to Beauty, or one of them.
Nonsense ... poetry... beauty .. .(it was, I think, A. E.
Housman the poet who called one of Shakespeare's loveliest
songs, "Take, O take those lips away," celestial nonsense)—can
Edward Lear help us to marshal that still rather discrepant-
seeming trio? A clue to that lies, I believe, in his art, the landscape
paintings and, more particularly, his water-colors and drawings.
42 Elizabeth Sewell
Nonsense Verse and the Child 43
44 Elizabeth Sewell

To connect Lear himself, as man and artist, with poetry and

beauty is straightforward enough. It was common knowledge that
he was an admirer and friend of Lord Tennyson, and had a lifelong
project to illustrate a broad selection of the Poet Laureate's works
with two hundred paintings of his own. In the end all that came of
this was a limited edition in which three of Tennyson's poems were
accompanied by twenty-two of Lear's landscapes. Franklin
Lushington, Lear's friend, who wrote the introduction, says of the
artist that he works "sometimes with a few swift incisive strokes
and broad simplicity of effect; always with... the highest
appreciation of whatever poetical beauty the scene he was drawing
contained."9 Those qualities appear particularly clearly in Lear's
drawings, of which two small examples are here given (Figs. 3 and
4), with the sense which they and the watercolors give of planes
and levels, perspectives opening out in series and hierarchies—I
am thinking momentarily of Whorf again. The Nonsense is as yet,
however, unconnected.
But was it really separate, or is this just our determination to
categorize and classify, analysis being the only method we trust, or
even know? Another small drawing of Lear's reproduced in a fairly
recent biography of him,10 shows that the artist did not always
keep them segregated. It depicts a view in the Roman Campagna,
but taking his leisure in the foreground is an unmistakable denizen
of the Nonsense world (Fig. 5). A few critics, too, give us
encouragement for a more unified approach, and interestingly,
this seems to go hand in hand with a growing recognition of Lear's
artistic achievements. W. B. Osgood Field, who is on the whole
rather unappreciative of Lear as landscape painter, nonetheless
quotes the following, by Martin Hardie in 1930," "Lear, we think,
is far greater as draughtsman and painter than has hitherto been
admitted," a comment supported in Ray Murphy's introduction to
Edward Lear's Indian Journal, 1954: "By looking at his water-
colours (which were largely executed for his own amusement) we
today realize that his genius was not limited to his nonsense
verses.... They [the water-colors] represent an unique
achievement... a century in advance of the prevailing artistic
 Nonsense Verse and the Child 45

conventions of his time."12 Extend the notion of genius, then, from

the nonsense into the d rawing and water-colors—surely the genius
must be all of the same kind? If we ask next, as we must, "Of what
kind?" an interesting small clue is presented by Martin Hardie, just
quoted above. He sets up a little formal statement, almost an
equation, saying of Lear, "His drawings were to him what
mathematics were to Lewis Carroll"—Mathematics:Carroll:: Art:
Lear. Since mathematics was at the heart of Carroll's Nonsense,
then on this view art must be at the heart of Lear's. It is the
mathematics and logic which make Alice's creator the
methodologist of Nonsense. Edward Lear, "this child," may be its
aesthetician.
One can only surmise where this might lead. All Õ want to
suggest, finally, is that Nonsense may prove to be one of the child's
roads to Beauty. An indirect one it seems to us, a crooked one
maybe. But William Blake would be there to remind us that the
crooked roads are roads of Genius.
46 Elizabeth Sewell

Figure 5
From Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer. Houghton-Mifflin,
1969.
 Nonsense Verse and the Child 47

Notes

1 William B. Osgood Field, Edward Lear on my Shelves (Munich:

Bremer Press, privately printed, 1933), p. 90.

2 Field, p. 65.

' Phyllis Atkinson and Jane Nugent, to whom my thanks.

4 William Cole, ed., Oh, What Nonsense (New York: Viking, 1966).

5 Edward Lear, Teapots and Quails and Other New Nonsenses, ed.
Angus Davidson and Philip Hofer (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1954).

6 Field, pp. 202, 204,210.

7 Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense (London: Chatto& Windus,

1952).
8 Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, ed. John B.
Carroll (New York: Technology Press of M.LT. & John Wiley & Sons
Inc.; London: Chapman & Hall Ltd., 1956). The essay in question dates
from 1942.

9 Lord Alfred Tennyson, Poems. Illustrated by Edward Lear (London:

Boussod, Valadon & Co.; New York: Scribner&Welford, 1889) p. 1IL(In
his own extended project for these illustrations, Lear had chosen no less
than five possible scenes for "The splendour falls on castle walls," not
included in this small collection. They were his paintings of SuIi, Epirus,
Albania; Sermoneta, Pontine Marshes, Italy; Celano, Abruzzi, Italy; San
Nocito, Calabria, Italy; Bracciano, Italy.) The volume contains
Tennyson's poetic tribute to the painter, "To E.L."—not one of his best
productions. A more effective tribute is paid to Lear as landscape painter
and creator of beauty in a poem by the present Poet Laureate of Great
Britain, Sir John Betjeman, in "Greek Orthodox" from A Nip in the Air,
(New York: Norton, 1974).

10 Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1969), p. 66. It is taken from a sketchbook of 1842.

11 Field, p. 223, from an article in Artwork, A Quarterly Magazine

edited by D.S. MacColl, No. 22, Summer (London, 1930).
48 Elizabeth Sewell

12 Ray Murphy, ed., Edward Lear's Indian Journal (New York:

Coward McCann. 1954), p. 25.

Born in India of English parents and educated at Cambridge University.

Elizabeth Sewell has been visiting writer or professor at Vassar,
Fordham. Princeton, California State, Hunter, Universities of California
at Irvine, and North Carolina at Greensboro, among other institutions.
Her books include the following works of criticism: The Structure of
Poetry (1951). Paul Valéry: The Mind in the Mirror (1952), The Field of
Nonsense ( 1952), The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History (1960,
1972). The Human Metaphor (1964), and To Be a True Poem(\979). She
has also published works of fiction- The Dividing of Time (1951), The
Singular Hope (1955). Now Bless Thyself (1962)—and poetry- -Poems,
1947-1961 (1962), and Signs and Cities (1968). Ms. Sewell lives in
Greensboro, North Carolina.

Photographs from Edward Lear on My Shelves by Harvey Seizer.