'Over the land and over the sea': Selected Nonsense and Travel Writings E-Book

Edward Lear

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2005

Beschreibung

Edward Lear (1812-1888) is one of the best-loved of English poets. His comic invention and unconstrained sense of the absurd have been enjoyed by generations of children, and treasured by adults conscious of the subtle melancholy that underlies the fun. This collection includes all the favourite nonsense poems. Peter Swaab sets them alongside a generous selection from Lear's six travel books (including his three Journals of a Landscape Painter), first published between 1841 and 1870, and long out of print. For the first time Lear is presented as an adventurer, not only in the fabled lands of the Jumblies and the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, but also in nineteenth-century Albania, Greece, Calabria and Corsica, where his encounters with the people and customs of these sometimes equally strange and challenging cultures are recorded with the same acute and rueful comic imagination.

Leseprobe

FyfieldBooks aim to make available some of the great classics of British and European literature in clear, affordable formats, and to restore often neglected writers to their place in literary tradition.

FyfieldBooks take their name from the Fyfield elm in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Scholar Gypsy’ and ‘Thyrsis’. The tree stood not far from the village where the series was originally devised in 1971.

Roam on! The light we sought is shining still.

Dost thou ask proof? Our tree yet crowns the hill,

Our Scholar travels yet the loved hill-side

from ‘Thyrsis’

EDWARD LEAR

‘Over the Land and Over the Sea’

Selected Nonsense and Travel Writings

Edited with an introduction byPETER SWAAB

‘And we’d go to the Dee, and the Jelly Bo Lee, Over the land, and over the sea; –

Please take me a ride! O do!’

Said the Duck to the Kangaroo.

from ‘The Duck and the Kangaroo’

Contents

Title Page

Epigraph

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Selected Further Reading

Nonsense Writings

Eclogue

‘When the light dies away on a calm summer’s eve’

Ode to the little China Man

The Hens of Oripò

Limericks from A Book of Nonsense (1846 and1855)

Limericks from A Book of Nonsense (1861)

‘She sits upon her Bulbul’

The Duck and the Kangaroo

The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World

Growling Eclogue

The Owl and the Pussy-cat

The Broom, the Shovel, the Poker, and the Tongs

The Daddy Long-legs and the Fly

Nonsense Cookery

Nonsense Botany (1)

The Jumblies

The Nutcrackers and the Sugar-tongs

Mr and Mrs Discobbolos

The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò

Limericks from More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, Etc. (1872)

Nonsense Botany (2)

‘Cold are the crabs that crawl on yonder hill’

The Scroobious Pip

The Quangle Wangle’s Hat

The Pobble who has no Toes

The Akond of Swat

The Cummerbund: An Indian Poem

The Pelican Chorus

The Two Old Bachelors

The Dong with a Luminous Nose

Nonsense Trees

‘Mrs Jaypher found a wafer’

The Later History of the Owl and the Pussy-cat

‘O dear! how disgusting is life!’

‘How pleasant to know Mr Lear!’

Mr and Mrs Discobbolos: Second Part

Some Incidents in the Life of my Uncle Arly

‘He only said “I’m very weary”’

Travel Writings

from the Prospectus to Views in Rome and Its Environs: Drawn from Nature and on Stone (1841)

from Illustrated Excursions in Italy, Volumes I and II (1846)

from Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania, Etc. (1851)

from Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, Etc. (1852)

‘A Leaf from the Journals of a Landscape Painter’ (1858, 1897)

from Views in the Seven Ionian Islands (1863)

from Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica (1870)

Appendix: Lear and Natural History

Index of Nonsense Verse First Lines

Index of Places

About the Author

Copyright

List of Illustrations

Lear’s drawing for the title page of the 1846 and 1855 editions of A Book of Nonsense1

Title page to Views in Rome and Its Environs (1841), Lear’s lithograph of the castle of Ostia115

Title page to Illustrated Excursions in Italy (1846), Lear’s lithograph of Santa Maria di Collemaggio, Aquila121

Map of the Three Abruzzi, from Illustrated Excursions in Italy (1846)122

Music of the Pifferari, from the Appendix to Illustrated Excursions in Italy (1846)128

Lear’s lithograph of the Pass of Anversa, plate 24 from Illustrated Excursions in Italy (1846)154

Map of Albania, from Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania, Etc. (1851)167

Lear’s lithograph of Khimára from Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania, Etc. (1851)218

Drawing by Lear (probably early 1850s), from Vivien Noakes, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (1968). Reproduced by permission of Vivien Noakes235

Map of part of the Kingdom of Naples, province of Calabria Ulteriore Prima, from Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, Etc. (1852)236

Lear’s lithograph of Palizzi, plate 3 from Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, Etc. (1852)245

Lear’s drawing from letter to Chichester Fortescue (March 9, 1858), on the necessity for firearms practice before travelling to the Middle East, from The Letters of Edward Lear, ed. Lady Strachey (1907)281

Lear’s lithograph of the view from ‘One Gun Battery’, Corfú, title page to Views in the Seven Ionian Islands (1863)297

Map of Corsica, from Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica (1870)305

Lear’s lithograph of Sarténé, plate 5 from Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica (1870)319

Lear’s drawing for ‘V’ in a nonsense alphabet drawn in 1870, published in More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, Etc. (1872)341

Acknowledgements

The illustrations on pages 115 and 122 are reproduced by permission of the British Library; those on pages 121, 128, 154, 167, 218, 236, 245, 297, 305, and 319 by permission of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library; and that on page 235 by permission of Vivien Noakes. I would also like to thank Vivien Noakes for permission to reproduce the ‘Ode to the little China man’ and its illustration, and the poem ‘O dear! how disgusting is life!’; PoetryReview, for ‘When the light dies away on a calm summer’s eve’; and Marie-Lou Legg, for permission to quote from the unpublished typescript ‘The Road to San Remo: The Pilgrimage of Edward Lear’ by Humphrey Jennings.

I would like to thank the following for help and suggestions: James Ball; Lesley Benjamin; Charles Cox; Greg Dart; Jonathan Edmondson; T. Lux Feininger and the late Pat Feininger; Graeme and Fiona Frost; Philip Horne; Kevin Jackson; Alison Light; Anna Monticelli; Katharine Morton; Patrizia Oliver; A.F. Paddock; Allen Reddick; Peter Robinson; Ornella Trevisan; Henry Woudhuysen; and Melissa Zeiger. Andrew McDonald has been an indispensable help and a fine guide to Lear as painter and draughtsman. My thanks to Judith Willson of Carcanet Press for her expertise and imagination in editing this book. Finally, I would like to acknowledge Vivien Noakes for her indispensable books on Lear and for her generous advice.

Introduction

Edward Lear was one of the most gifted and adventurous travel writers of his time, though most of his readers are too young to know him in this guise. Of the seniors who have felt curious about his travel writing there must be many who have found, as I have, that the books are extremely difficult to get hold of. The first of his four travel journals (1846) has never been reprinted (not even excerpts), and none of the four has been in print for many years. This edition aims to make Lear available again as a travel writer, and to show his nonsense and travel writings alongside each other as twin areas of his versatile creative life.

The remarkable thing is that until now these two sides of Lear’s writing life have never been brought together in a single volume. But what, after all, is nonsense poetry if not a poetry of departures, always departing from our usual norms, often in stories of voyaging and questing? And what is travel writing if not a series of encounters with the extraordinary and often absurd? Looking at Lear’s writing as a whole makes better sense of its individual parts, and gives us the chance to see the interconnectedness of his career. In working on this edition I found I was following in the distinguished footsteps of the English filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, who in the 1940s put together a sort of biography-cum-anthology of Lear, stitching together source materials from his nonsense, letters and journals. Jennings argued that we should see his work as a multifaceted whole: ‘we should cease to regard him as a not very successful landscape painter who wrote children’s books in his spare time, which grown ups find amusing and to which some people would go so far as to give the name “poetry”… In place of this picture I see the life of Lear as a whole – the so-called Nonsense poetry filling an increasing part of it as he got older – and being increasingly absolutely an expression of himself’ (‘The Road to San Remo: The Pilgrimage of Edward Lear’).

Lear as Poet

The first of Lear’s poems which survives is an ‘Eclogue’, written in 1825 when his family were forced by financial difficulties to leave their home in Highgate. He was 13 at the time. A parody of William Collins’s ‘Hassan – the Camel Driver’, it brings together the worlds of suburban London and the exotic east: he was in a way moved to be a travel writer from the first. He also had the wit and character at 13 to put humour to work as a way of dealing with bad times (just as he would at 55 in his next, ‘growling’, eclogue, which looks wryly at the moans and groans of the grumpy old men Lear and J.A. Symonds). Exile and rootlessness were to remain central to his experience and his writing. ‘My Sweet Home is no longer mine’, was his traditional title for a poem of 1838, in a melting idiom suggesting how far his early sensibility was influenced by Tom Moore and Byron, orthodox tastes of the late Romantic moment of his adolescence. Lear’s vocation as poet was to produce new, comic variations on the Romantic themes of yearning, alienation and adventure.

A Book of Nonsense was published in 1846 under the pseudonym ‘Derry down Derry’. It comprised seventy-three ‘nonsenses’, as Lear called them, or ‘limericks’, as they came to be known (the word is first recorded in 1898), written while he was working at Knowsley Hall as a zoological illustrator. This had been his professional field since he was 17, first at the newly opened zoological gardens in Regent’s Park in London, and later working mainly with John Gould on the grand ornithological books which were fashionable at the time. Lord Derby had been impressed by Lear’s superb and innovative volume of parrot lithographs, and engaged him to draw his ‘menagerie’ near Liverpool. In the evenings Lear often entertained the children of the house with poems and games, and it was his celebrity with the children that brought him to his employer’s attention, and led to his promotion from downstairs status as employee to upstairs one as house-guest.

Some of the limericks present a sort of menagerie too, a collection of unusual specimens. The rigid outlines of Lear’s limericks make the poems into miniature life stories, classifying the habitat and chief characteristics of the specimen in question, duly illustrated in the accompanying drawing. First, the species, generally an old man or old person, but sometimes a young lady: ‘There was an Old Person’. Next, their habitat: ‘of Blythe’. Then, their chief identifying behaviour: ‘Who cut up his meat with a scythe’. After this we generally see how they interact with their fellows (‘When they said “Well! I never!” – he cried, “Scythes for ever!”’), and return to a summary in the final line: ‘That lively old person of Blythe’.

Looking at the scientific texts alongside Lear’s zoological illustrations (some of the former are included as the Appendix on ‘Lear and Natural History’), one can see details which might well have appealed to a young man with a sense of the absurd. In AMonograph of the Ramphastidae, or Family of Toucans by John Gould (1834), one of the toucans ‘is extremely shy, … keeping to the tops of the highest trees, and exercising the utmost wariness and caution’, as well it might, since its scientific observers meant it no good (kidnap or killing would be its fate). ‘It is said’, Gould noted, ‘to be extremely partial to the banana.’ Another of the toucans presents a natural enigma, with ‘peculiar markings of the mandibles, which in some measure resemble Hebrew characters’. Among the observers of these rare birds are the bipeds Professor Wagler and Dr Such. A few years later, in The Birds of Europe (1837), we find an Egyptian vulture which has strayed into Somerset and unluckily found a dead sheep: ‘with the flesh of which it was so gorged, as to be either incapable of flight, or, at all events, unwilling to exert itself sufficiently to effect its escape; it was therefore shot with little difficulty’. There is also an owl with an eloquent melancholy night-song, but when it ‘accidentally wanders abroad by day, it is so dazzled by the sun that it becomes stupid, and may be easily taken’. Other books observe an emu which ‘has somehow lost an eye’, another emu unwilling to breed in England, and turtles both tame and fearsome. One species of turtle found in India is ‘so tenacious of life’ that ‘their heads bite vigorously after being completely dissevered from their bodies’. Some of these far-fetched and colourful creatures, with their weird, dubious and various ways, could be seen as the precursors of the hybrid and sometimes grotesque heroes of Lear’s nonsense poems. The very Victorian activities of global exploration and scientific classification suggest a structure for the discoveries of the nonsense world, in Lear’s botanies and alphabets as well as in his narrative poems.

Lear’s limericks have sometimes been conceived in romantic terms. Aldous Huxley found them part of an ‘eternal struggle between the genius or the eccentric and his fellow-beings’. George Orwell homed in on the Old Man of Whitehaven:

There was an Old Man of Whitehaven,

Who danced a quadrille with a Raven;

But they said – ‘It’s absurd, to encourage this bird!’

So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.

‘To smash somebody just for dancing a quadrille with a raven is exactly the kind of thing that “They” would do’, Orwell remarked. But maybe this Old Man’s offence is even worse: he doesn’t just dance with the raven, but is thought more subversively to ‘encourage’ it (him? her?), and where might that end? Quoth the Raven ‘Give me more’? People from white havens shouldn’t dance with black birds; and two creatures have no business to dance a quadrille: both semantic and mathematical proprieties are offended. Orwell chose a good example, but his generalizing sense of ‘They’ owes more to his 1984 than to Lear’s 1849 (or so). Ina Rae Hark has noted that what W.H. Auden called ‘the legions of cruel inquisitive They’ are on the offensive in only about 20 of the first series of 112 limericks; and in the second series of 100 they tend to be less offensive still. She picks out six types of limerick plots in which ‘they’ variously figure. ‘They’ may be: hostile and quell the old man; hostile but themselves quelled; hostile but provoked; neutral but rebutted; friendly and approving; sympathetic and helpful – hardly, then, a uniform protest about relations between the individual and society. The old men, moreover, are not always geniuses; sometimes they are boors, lunatics or self-harmers. The violence and irrationality in the poems don’t belong only to ‘they’. Nor do the stories always pit an alienated individual against a repressive society. The outcomes are very various, sometimes happy but rather more often not, sometimes anarchic, at others law-abiding, sometimes cheery, at others blithely murderous. Hark has assembled some interesting statistics on the components of the limericks: 169 out of the 212 have an old man or old person, 28 a young lady, and 10 a young person. The figure’s place of origin is named in 172, and only 14 fail to reinstate him or her there in the last line. ‘They’ figure in fewer than half the poems, and ‘they’ are never killed. About one poem in five includes eating or drinking, and a similar number involve animals, more of these in the second series. About a quarter of the first series threaten death, but far fewer than this in the second series. Within the collections one gets a sense of fate as chancy: natural selection in the nonsense world is ruled by the forces of alliteration and rhyme and the sound of the hometown, the luck of the draw or the luck of the alphabet, with such logic as these have but not a whit more.

The brevity of the poems wards off pathos and keeps them out of the deeper waters they often suggest. Lear had found a laconic poetic form which suited his penchant for touching on his darker feelings but not dwelling on them; it would, for instance, take little to turn this passage (from an 1862 letter written in Corfu) into a limerick: ‘There is a man in a boat here under the window – who catches fish all and every day with a long 5 pronged fork: a waistcoat and drawers being his dress. Why should I not do the same?’

There was an Old Man of Corfu

Who caught fish with a fork all day through.

When they said ‘Can’t you shift?’, he replied ‘No, I’ll drift!’,

That stubborn Old Man of Corfu.

Lear would have done better, especially with line two (easily improved by relocating the old man to New York), but even this amateur effort shows a possible fit between his cast of mind and the shape of the limerick – especially in conjunction with his drawings, which could here supply the waistcoat and drawers and each prong of the fork. The key is the externalization of that plaintive question ‘Why should I not do the same?’ Instead of the melancholy hint at an inertia like that of Tennyson’s Mariana or his lotos-eaters, the limerick gives a brisk plot of self-will rebuffing friendly (or irritable) concern.

All of Lear’s poems were originally published with his own illustrations (as they are also in this edition), and the limericks in particular cannot be separated from the drawings. The image often lightens the poem, as for instance with the Old Man of Whitehaven, where we see the dancing, not the smashing, and where the Old Man’s bird-like hair and the wings of his coat suggest that he and the bird are well paired. They gaze raptly at each other, too. Thomas Byrom has argued that the drawings, especially in the second series, give us ‘a minor sublime’ and depict a ‘radiant affinity between man and nature’. Certainly the drawings defy gravity, often in both senses, with plenty of dancing and tiptoe and rising off the ground. His figures are wonderfully dynamic and vivid in gesture. In her book on Lear’s birds, Susan Hyman suggests that ‘It is in his nonsense rather than his landscapes that Lear reveals himself most clearly as a trained naturalist.’

Nonsense poetry is by definition a departure from the normal, and it often takes travel as its subject. It may be English literature’s closest counterpart to the French ‘poésie de départs’ – the poetry of departures. Many of Lear’s later poems are stories of escape, not just ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’, but among others ‘The Daddy Long-legs and the Fly’ and ‘The Nutcrackers and the Sugar-tongs’. They mingle an aggressively disenchanted sense of home with a woozier hope, sometimes gratified, for an enchanted elsewhere. When Auden writes in his poem on Lear that ‘affection was miles away’, he catches a dual aspect of such travel literature, implying both that affection was miles away from his ordinary life, a painful absence, but also that affection had its real and genuine life miles away, available as a far prospect for the imagination. Poems like Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark and Lear’s ‘The Jumblies’ catch something about the character of islanders going to sea in search of such satisfactions of elsewhere. The mysterious compulsiveness of British imperial globe-trotting is no less captivating in these poems than in such acknowledged Victorian masterpieces as Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ and Browning’s ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’. Take the Jumblies:

They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,

In a Sieve they went to sea:

In spite of all their friends could say,

On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,

In a Sieve they went to sea!

And when the Sieve turned round and round,

And every one cried, ‘You’ll all be drowned!’

They called aloud, ‘Our Sieve ain’t big,

But we don’t care a button! we don’t care a fig!

In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!’

Far and few, far and few,

Are the lands where the Jumblies live;

Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,

And they went to sea in a Sieve.

Unlike Lear’s limerick seafarers, there is a collective here, a jumble of Jumblies. The escape has turned entirely sociable: they aren’t moony solitaries. It is a comradely idyll without leaders and rank, in which everyone has the same impulse at the same time. It makes a contrast with the rigid stratifications of Lewis Carroll’s crew in The Hunting of the Snark, who all begin with the letter ‘B’, but are divided by their professions (butcher, baker, bellman and so on), and by the fact that some of them wish to kill others. The map in Carroll’s poem is ‘a perfect and absolute blank’, and the Snark turns out to be insolubly enigmatic (like ‘The Scroobious Pip’ and ‘The Akond of Swat’ in later poems by Lear), but ‘The Jumblies’ is not so philosophically exercised. We may not know where they are going, or why, or for how long, and there is no sign that they do either, but ‘we don’t care a button! We don’t care a fig!’: the heart of the matter is the call to go. It is not the best time, as their gloomy friends and the grim weather make clear, but the Jumblies and their makeshift vessel are buoyant in spite of the worst the world can do, and in spite of the usual laws regulating the behaviour of sieves. Theirs might be thought a romantically idiotic venture, and perhaps it is kept afloat by a literary tradition of inspired lunacy going back to Wordsworth’s comic masterpiece ‘The Idiot Boy’. The idea is that you don’t have to be sensible to get places. Their sieve is able to go round and round, and also to go forward to the ‘lands where the Jumblies live’, evoked by Lear as a sort of luxury supermarket.

They sailed to the Western Sea, they did,

To a land all covered with trees,

And they bought an Owl, and a useful Cart,

And a pound of Rice, and a Cranberry Tart,

And a hive of silvery Bees

– who soon rhyme with ‘no end of Stilton Cheese’. The nay-saying friends are proven guilty of what economists call ‘Excessive Risk Aversiveness’, though as is their conservative wont they don’t say so. ‘The Jumblies’ is unusual in finishing in conciliatory style with a poésie de retours, with a look ahead to a new generation recruited by their promotion of seafaring. The refrain, however, continues to imagine them elsewhere: ‘Far and few, far and few, / Are the lands where the Jumblies live’, we hear again at the end, with an ungrammatical twist on Lear’s crucial word ‘far’.

The Jumblies’ heads are green and their hands are blue, but we know little else about them. In particular, neither the poem nor the illustration tells us whether they are boy Jumblies (as maritime convention might suggest) or girl Jumblies. The poem has much of the lure of romanticism, but none of the complications of sex, complications which are so common elsewhere in the literature of exotic travel. Like much of the best children’s literature, ‘The Jumblies’ takes pleasure in a moment before sexuality makes its presence unignorable.

In his other longer poems and stories, Lear’s travellers who set off together tend to be odd couples. The Owl and the Pussy-cat, for instance, are creatures who have very few links in life, the main one – a taste for mice – being softened and vegetarianised to mince and quince. Yet although they make an odd couple, they are not so odd as to think themselves disqualified from marriage and its formal recognitions. As in ‘The Jumblies’, the regular world is left behind, but its ways are not entirely repudiated. It is only in a partial sense that Victorian nonsense – ‘a conservative-revolutionary genre’ as Jean-Jacques Lecercle calls it – can be thought of as protest literature. Dancing in the honeymoonlight which bathes the poem, the Owl and the Pussy-cat more wistfully, but less pessimistically, get on terms with another Victorian classic, Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’. Arnold’s is also a seaside honeymoon poem, but his newlyweds watch ‘ignorant armies clash by night’ instead of dancing by the light of the moon.

Lear’s unfinished sequel, generally known as ‘The Later History of the Owl and the Pussy-cat’, gives us a male owl, but in the original poem he mixes the signals. The owl does the serenading, and takes the ring, as a groom might; but the pussy proposes, and stands on the right in the illustrations to the second and third verses – also as a groom might. The poem is not so much a gender-bender as a gender-transcender. If you can marry across species, why worry about gender? (Other escapee couples in Lear, such as Mr Daddy Long-legs and Mr Floppy Fly, and the Nutcrackers and the Sugar-tongs, also fail to fit the Mr and Mrs norm). Lear imagines for us a world where such impossibilities can happen:

What a beautiful Pussy you are,

You are,

You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!

It is the third ‘You are!’, with its exultant exclamation mark, which makes this such a grand cry of amazement and happiness. Omit the line and the rhythm is smoothed, but much of the magic is gone.

Nonsense writing can be a place where such extraordinary intimacies can flourish, but always within the boundaries of the self-consciously fantastical genre, and sometimes within limits evoked by the nonsense narratives themselves. Compare the epithalamium of Lear’s Owl and Pussy-cat, left to their future with our blessing, with this poignant episode from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There:

So they walked on together through the wood, Alice with her arms clasped lovingly round the soft neck of the Fawn, till they came out again into another open field, and here the Fawn gave a sudden bound into the air, and shook itself free from Alice’s arms. ‘I’m a Fawn!’ it cried out in a voice of delight, ‘and, dear me! you’re a human child!’ A sudden look of alarm came into its beautiful brown eyes, and in another moment it had darted away at full speed.

Alice stood looking after it, almost ready to cry with vexation at having lost her dear little fellow-traveller so suddenly. ‘However, I know my name now’, she said, ‘that’s some comfort. Alice – Alice – I won’t forget it again. And now, which of these finger-posts ought I to follow, I wonder?’

Carroll’s magic wood is a loving place, but it depends on its inhabitants not remembering who they are. The Fawn is delighted to rediscover its normal self even though this means abandoning poor Alice, and Alice with characteristic mettle puts her vexation behind her and starts afresh on her way.

Lear’s lovelorn figures are less consolable, especially in his darker, later poems, which include spectacularly unhappy versions of romantic love. Nonsense writing often includes creatures with unfortunate structures of desire (like those of its foremost exponents, Lear, Carroll and Housman): they may be abandoned by their loved one, like the Dong with the Luminous Nose (of whom The Spectator in 1887 pointed out that his was a ‘nonsense version of the love of Nausicaa for Ulysses, only that the sexes are inverted’); their timing may be out, as with the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò; or they may be too narcissistically bound up in themselves and their jobs to have much time for intimacy, like many of Lewis Carroll’s creatures in the Alice books, including the Cheshire Cat, Humpty Dumpty, and the White Knight. The adult implication that all desire can be seen as a nonsense gives these writings an emotional charge, and a place alongside other children’s literature fearful of the burdens of adulthood, including Kipling’s Jungle Books and Barrie’s Peter Pan.

The fact that the nonsense world includes versions of life’s misfits, mismatches and bereavements is one of the things that stops it from being quaint or winsome. Indeed, the Saturday Review in 1888 suggested that Lear’s subjects ‘gallantly bear their eccentricities and nobly disregard any of those inconveniences which ensue upon the indulgence of personal eccentricity’, quite bringing him into line with the traditions of Victorian high stoicism. Lear had many reasons not to feel at home with himself: besides what biographical evidence suggests was for him an unhappy homosexual orientation, he was afflicted from childhood by epilepsy, which he concealed from almost all of his friends; and by chronic depression, which he called ‘the morbids’, as though it had some sort of life of its own. His last major poem, ‘Some Incidents in the Life of my Uncle Arly’, encodes the circumstances of his life and sets them to notes of beautifully controlled pathos. His other writings can at times be astonishingly fierce. Mr Discobbolos, for instance, lives on top of a wall (like Tennyson’s St Simeon Stylites up his pillar) and eventually dynamites himself, along with his wife and twelve kids: ‘Let the wild bee sing and the blue bird hum! / For the end of our lives has certainly come!’, he announces in lines of creepy psycho sublimity. For their detonation Lear borrows a cadence from Tennyson’s comparably demented Maud: ‘And the mortified mountain echoed again / To the sounds of an awful fall!’ Again, in one of his prose children’s stories, ‘The History of the Seven Families of the Lake Pipple-Popple’, he sends seven lots of seven children tearfully out on their voyages: that makes no fewer than forty-nine childish voyagers, and every last one is killed off, mostly eaten, leaving the various predators, Lear tells us, to return to ‘their respective homes full of joy and respect, sympathy, satisfaction, and disgust’. Children often enjoy a good dose of violence and disaster in their reading, but you might think twice before reading this to the more sensitive souls.

Lear as Travel Writer

When he gave up his work as a zoological illustrator, Lear turned to landscape painting for a livelihood, so he had a professional reason to keep on the move in the search for new views to depict. His published journals represent a small fraction of the ground he covered, nearly always on foot, which included Crete, Corsica, Egypt, Sinai, Palestine, India, as well as many regions of Greece and Italy. He really was a remarkable traveller. ‘In an age that abounded in travel writers and travel painters’, Susan Hyman argues, ‘he was both, leaving a visual and verbal record of foreign lands that was unique in his own time and possibly unequalled in any other.’ Commercial considerations were not his only spur. As Vivien Noakes brings out in her biography, he took pleasure in travel for its own sake and for its benefits to his state of mind: ‘Lear always enjoyed walking – it was the most certain way of keeping off attacks of epilepsy – and he found the world a happier place when he was outside and on the move.’ He seems himself to have thought of Wanderlust remedially: ‘if you are absolutely alone in the world, and likely to be so, then move about continually and never stand still’, he wrote to Chichester Fortescue in 1859: ‘I therefore think I shall be compulsed and more especially by the appearance of things on the horizon’. If it was a matter of being ‘compulsed’, then it was a mostly happy and willing compulsion. Even in his bleakest misery after the death of his beloved older sister Ann in 1861, his mind turned to the prospect of travel for relief from grief and solitude:

I am all at sea and do not know my way an hour ahead.

I shall be so terribly alone.

Wandering about a little may do some good perhaps.

(Letter to Fortescue, March 18 1861)

The temper of the journals is generally buoyant and high-spirited, alive with Lear’s pleasure in incident and encounter, which sometimes gives them a Pickwickian charm; and with his appreciation of beautiful surroundings, which at its best leads to descriptions of Coleridgean precision and emotion. ‘The Elements – trees, clouds, etc., – silence… seem to have far more part with me or I with them, than mankind’, he wrote in 1862, but on his travels he had no need to choose between sociability and sublimity.

There are two particularly vivid accounts of Lear at work as a landscape painter. The first is by Charles Church, describing Lear in Thermopylae in 1848, a few months before the trip recorded in the Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania, Etc.:

he was at work all the time, from three o’clock in the morning, only resting during the midheat – among the crowds in the market place, among the soldiers, only intent upon his work, with infinite patience and unflagging good humour and coolness.

The other account, from Lear’s later years, is by his young friend and pupil, Hubert Congreve, and also suggests his speed and concentration:

When we came to a good subject, Lear would sit down, and taking his block from George [his servant Giorgio Kokali], would lift his spectacles, and gaze for several minutes at the scene through a monocular glass he always carried; then, laying down the glass, and adjusting his spectacles, he would put on paper the view before us, mountain range, villages and foreground, with a rapidity and accuracy that inspired me with awestruck admiration.

Both the rapidity and accuracy were legacies of his scientific experience as a painter of live animals. Jeremy Maas makes the interesting claim that ‘no artist understood the geological characteristics of strange wild landscape so well’ as Lear, once again suggesting the formative importance of his background as a trained observer in the sciences. Lear’s reputation as an artist is still changing, but the majority opinion is that the oil paintings on which he rested his greatest hopes sadly lack the vitality and delicacy of his watercolours, which he would make by laying washes of colour over these rapidly executed drawings. With an output estimated by Vivien Noakes at around 300 oils and over 10,000 watercolours, Lear takes his place, whatever else may be true, as one of the hardest workers even of Victorian times.

To read Lear’s journals in sequence is to witness the period of most dramatic expansion in European tourism. In the excursions to the Abruzzi, Calabria and Albania, he is a traveller, frequently the first Englishman that local people have met. ‘England’, he is told in Calabria in 1847, ‘is a very small place… about the third part of the size of the city of Rome.’ He is thought to be a nonsensical figure with his discomfort and his sketchbook. But by the time of the last journal in Corsica in 1868, he is recognizably a tourist, recommending places to stay, and meeting fellow-travellers. But in the earlier books he is entirely dependent on letters of introduction, and he encounters revolution, cholera, two murders, bandits and a fire.

His method as a traveller combined preparation and improvisation. He would diligently research the available literature on the region in question, and furnish himself with letters of introduction from the great and the good; but he also allowed himself to digress if something unforeseen beckoned, like the great ‘festa’ in Tagliacozzo in the Illustrated Excursions in Italy, where he fell into a bed of broccoli while helping, or trying to help, put out a fire. ‘Put yourself, as a predestinarian might say, calmly into the dice-box of small events, and be shaken out whenever circumstances may ordain’, he tells himself in Saloníki, sounding for a moment like Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam. Socially, he found himself in a curious position, at one moment knocking on the door of the wealthiest landowner in a region, at the next bedding down in hovels. Lear enjoyed the sponsoring friendship of Britain’s high colonial administrators, though perhaps his position as professional artist meant that he was never quite on equal terms with them; but in his travels he mostly preferred to avoid the insulating effects of wealthy hospitality and, no less importantly, the social duties of a house-guest. Hans Magnus Enzensberger aptly describes his floating status as ‘that of the déclassé’ (‘die des Deklassierten’). He chose ‘liberty, hard living, and filth’, as he puts it in the Albania journals, over ‘luxury and inconvenience’, and the journals communicate a studentish pleasure in roughing it, abetted by the younger companions with whom he often chose to travel.

The journals themselves are full of haunting evocations:

August 13th, 1843. The cool valley of Antrodoco is in deep shade till late in the morning. I was sauntering by the brawling river, when a little boy passed me carrying a dead fox. ‘It is delightful food (cibo squisito)’, said he, ‘either boiled or roast’; – said I, ‘I wish you joy.’ (Illustrated Excursions)

There is something touching about the exchange of courtesies here, with Lear the pupil to his young pastoral guide. Humphrey Jennings, who included this passage in ‘The Road to San Remo’, finely notes what a ‘mediaeval picture Lear’s travel journals present – like going into the past – the “incommodo” and cut-offness of most of the people’. This sometimes finds expression in a piercingly heightened sense of the kindness and hospitality of strangers in far-off places, as in this short paragraph:

I wandered down to the river Liris, through a beautiful oak wood; dwelling much on the memory of such frequent hospitalities; such warm-hearted people; such primitive mountain homes. (Illustrated Excursions)

The Albanian journals are particularly interesting for the encounters between a predominantly Moslem culture and an undogmatically Christian author. Lear was sometimes militantly anti-clerical, sounding in one passage of his journals like Shelley or Blake – ‘for in all ages the Priest has been the advocate of lying, the promoter of darkness and hatred, the antagonist of light and progress’; but he was generally respectful of the varieties of religious faith, including both Islam and Judaism. In one astonishing incident in Elbassán, a religious clash born of the Islamic prohibition on figurative art dissolves into wild laughter:

when I had sketched such of the principal buildings as they could recognize, a universal shout of ‘Shaitan!’ [‘Devil!’] burst from the crowd; and, strange to relate, the greater part of the mob put their fingers into their mouths and whistled furiously, after the manner of butcher-boys in England. Whether this was a sort of spell against my magic I do not know; but the absurdity of sitting still on a rampart to make a drawing, while a great crowd of people whistled at me with all their might, struck me so forcibly that, come what might of it, I could not resist going off into convulsions of laughter, an impulse the Gheghes seemed to sympathize with, as one and all shrieked with delight, and the ramparts resounded with hilarious merriment. (Journals in Albania, Etc.)

For an epileptic to use the phrase ‘convulsions of laughter’ shows the high-wrought pitch of this moment, and ‘shrieked with delight’ has an alarming intensity, but it is an extraordinary evocation of absurdity producing sympathy. Other moments of cultural friendship also emerge from Lear’s ability to imagine, as if he were an outsider to himself, what he looks like:

We halted at the khan of Episkopí, close to a stream full of capital watercresses which I began to gather and eat with some bread and cheese, an act which provoked the Epirote bystanders of the village to ecstatic laughter and curiosity… One brought a thistle, a second a collection of sticks and wood, a third some grass; a fourth presented me with a fat grasshopper – the whole scene was acted amid shouts of laughter, in which I joined as loudly as any. We parted amazingly good friends, and the wits of Episkopí will long remember the Frank who fed on weeds out of the water. (Journals in Albania, Etc.)

Here he is the eccentric old man of the limericks, and ‘they’ humour him, enjoying the presence of the foreign creature and his nonsensical diet.

A number of the best moments in the journals involve wildlife, often in literal or metaphorical collision with the human. Something falls on his head in an Albanian khan: ‘flomp – miaw – fizz! – an accidental cat had tumbled from some unexplored height’. ‘Flomp – miaw – fizz’! Has anybody better caught the essence of falling cat? Or of moths – ‘big frizzly moths, bustling into my eyes and face’? Or of dignified absurdity – ‘a solitary elder sits, in the enjoyment of tobacco and serenity, and looking in his blue and yellow robes very like an encaged macaw’? These examples all come from the Albania journal; in the Calabrian one we are asked ‘Does a mullet plough? Can a prawn give milk?’, questions of the sort more usually found in schoolbooks, with the answer no, or in nonsense writing, with the answer yes. One of the touching encounters in Corsica involves a solemn goatherd boy who wants to reciprocate the kindness of Lear, who had given him two loaves of bread:

‘Perhaps,’ says he, ‘you might be pleased to know the names of my goats: one is Black-nose, another Silver-spot, that is Grey-foot, and this is Cippo. Cippo is quite the best goat in these parts, and likes to be talked to – come un Cristiano – just like a Christian – perhaps even, if you stand still, she may let you scratch the end of her nose and I will call her at once if you choose to try.’

‘The children are grave and thinking little animals’, he wrote to Emily Tennyson, about his Corsican travels. Lear’s humanity often emerges from his sense of a creatureliness we share across cultures.

‘By degrees I want to topographize and typographize all the journeyings of my life’, he wrote to Lady Waldegrave on 9 January 1868. He did not do so, and left many of his journals to the care of his executor and friend Franklin Lushington without having published them or prepared them for the press. Some of the travel writings have been edited and published since his death, notably the journals in Crete and India, but this edition has chosen to represent Lear as travel writer only by what he published in his lifetime. There has been one exception to the rule, the ‘Journey to Petra’, which was published with an introduction by Lushington, and with his authority, in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1897. Lear’s letters and unpublished journals are full of interest and offer many pleasures, but the guiding editorial principle in this book has been to represent his writings as they might have been seen by his contemporaries.

Note on the Text

The selection of nonsense writings follows the texts and the chronology used in Vivien Noakes’s 2001 Penguin edition of Lear’s Complete Verse and Other Nonsense. Excerpts from the travel journals are taken from the first editions: some of the punctuation conventions (mainly for quotations and parentheses) have been modernized, and the italicizing of foreign words and phrases has been standardized. Dates have been added at the start of journal entries, and locations when these are not obviously specified. Sets of four asterisks signify passages omitted from within a single journal entry. A few of the place-names occur in different versions: Lear was not completely consistent in his use of place-names, and many of these changed both within his time and between his time and now, especially in the Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania,Etc.

I have arranged the journal extracts as far as I could to give the outlines of a coherent narrative. Footnotes have been kept to a minimum, but none of the travel journals has been edited until now, and I have tried to supply what a modern reader is likely to need to follow the abridged text, and to understand Lear’s references to people, places and events. Lear’s own footnotes are indicated by superscript numbers, and mine by superscript asterisks.

With the exception of the magazine article ‘A Leaf from the Journals of a Landscape Painter’, all of the travel excerpts come from illustrated books. This edition reproduces the itinerary maps and one of the lithographs from the Illustrated Excursions in Italy and from each of the three Journals of a Landscape Painter. It also reproduces the illustrated title-pages of Views in Rome and itsEnvirons, Illustrated Excursions in Italy and Views of the Seven Ionian Islands. Although the Views in Rome and Views of the Seven IonianIslands were essentially books of lithographs, I have included brief excerpts from the accompanying or related texts so as to give a sample of all the travel books Lear published in his lifetime.

Selected Further Reading

Works by Edward Lear

A Book of Nonsense (1846), by ‘Derry down Derry’, new edition 1855, new enlarged edition 1861

Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets (1871)

More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, Etc. (1872)

Laughable Lyrics, A Fourth Book of Nonsense Poems, Songs, Botany, Music, Etc. (1877)

Views in Rome and its Environs: Drawn from Nature and on Stone (1841)

Illustrated Excursions in Italy (2 volumes, 1846)

Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania, Etc. (1851)

Journals of a Landscape Painter in Southern Calabria, Etc. (1852)

Views in the Seven Ionian Islands (1863)

Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica (1870)

Nonsense Songs and Stories (1895)

Queery Leary Nonsense, edited by Lady Strachey (1911)

Teapots and Quails, edited by Angus Davidson and Philip Hofer (1953)

The Complete Verse and Other Nonsense, edited by Vivien Noakes (2001)

Letters of Edward Lear, edited by Lady Strachey (1907)

Later Letters of Edward Lear, edited by Lady Strachey (1911)

Selected Letters of Edward Lear, edited by Vivien Noakes (1988)

Selected Travel Journals of Edward Lear, edited by Herbert Van Thal (1952)

Edward Lear’s Indian Journal, edited by Ray Murphy (1953)

Edward Lear: The Cretan Journal, edited by Rowena Fowler (Athens, 1984)

Edward Lear in the Levant: Travels in Albania, Greece, and Turkey in Europe 1848–1849, edited by Susan Hyman (1988)

Edward Lear: The Corfu Years: A Chronicle Presented through his Letters and Journals, edited by Philip Sherrard (1988)

Works about Lear and Nonsense Writing

Byrom, Thomas, Nonsense and Wonder: The Poems and Cartoons of Edward Lear (1977)

Colley, Ann C., Edward Lear and the Critics (1993)

Davidson, Angus, Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet (1938)

Empson, William, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935)

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, Edward Lears Kompletter Nonsensus (1977)

Hark, Ina Rae, Edward Lear (1982)

Haughton, Hugh, The Chatto Book of Nonsense Verse (1989)

Hyman, Susan, Edward Lear’s Birds (1980)

Lehmann, John, Edward Lear and his World (1977)

Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature (1994)

Levi, Peter, Edward Lear (1995)

Noakes, Vivien, Edward Lear 1812–1888 (1985, the catalogue of the Royal Academy exhibition of 1985)

Noakes, Vivien, Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer (1968, fourth edition 2004)

Noakes, Vivien, The Painter Edward Lear (1991)

Pitman, Ruth, Edward Lear’s Tennyson (1988)

Sewell, Elizabeth, The Field of Nonsense (1952)

Nonsense Writings

There was an old Derry down Derry,

Who loved to see little folks merry;

So he made them a Book,

And with laughter they shook,

At the fun of that Derry down Derry!

Nonsense Writings

Lear published his first Book of Nonsense in 1846 under the pseudonym ‘Derry down Derry’. It contained seventy-three illustrated limericks, printed as three-line verses of diminishing length. A second edition came out in 1855, and a third was published under Lear’s own name in 1861, adding forty-three new limericks and cancelling three rather fierce ones (‘Kildare’, ‘New York’ and the ‘Sailor of Compton’, all included here).

His next, more miscellaneous nonsense books were Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets (1871); More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, Botany, Etc. (1872), which included one hundred more limericks; and Laughable Lyrics: A Fourth Book of Nonsense Poems, Songs, Botany, Music, Etc. (1877). The posthumous collections Nonsense Songs and Stories (1895), Queery Leary Nonsense (1911), edited by Lady Strachey, and Teapots and Quails (1953), edited by Angus Davidson and Philip Hofer, contained some previously unpublished nonsense writings. Vivien Noakes’s superb Penguin edition of the Complete Verse and Other Nonsense (2001) includes a considerable amount of materials and versions previously uncollected or unpublished.

This selection is arranged chronologically in order of composition, following the sequence suggested by Vivien Noakes.

Eclogue

Eclogue*

Vide Collins ‘Hassan – or the Camel Driver’

In dreary silence down the bustling road

The Lears – with all their goods and chattels rode;

Ten carts of moveables went on before,

And in the rear came half-a-dozen more;

A Hackney-coach the Lears themselves enshrouds

To guard them from the gaze of vulgar crowds.

The vehicle has reached the turnpike gate, –

Where wond’ring toll-men, – throngs of people wait; –

The loaded carts their dusty way pursue, –

Shrill squeak the wheels, – dark London was in view.

With grief heart-rending then, those mournful folk

Thrice sighed – thrice wiped their eyes – as thus they spoke:

‘Sad was the hour – and luckless was the day

When first from Bowman’s Lodge we bent our way! –

‘How little half the woes can we foresee,

Of that thrice odious New Street where we flee! –

Bethink thee Mother! – can we ever find

Half room enough for all these goods behind? –

Soon must those carts their precious loads resign, –

Then, what but noise and trouble shall be thine! –

Ye banished furnitures, that once did bear

In our last Halls a more than equal share,

Here, where no dark rooms shew their craving door,

Or mildewed lumberrooms make place for more,

In vain ye hope the comfort – space – to know,

Which dark rooms large or lumberrooms bestow, –

Here closets only – dwarfish rooms are found,

And scanty inconvenience rules around.

Sad was the hour and luckless was the day

When first from Bowman’s Lodge we bent our way!

‘What noisome thought could urge our parents so –

To leave the country and to London go!

The rural scene to change for houses, brown,

And barter health for the thick smoke of town!

What demon tempts him from our home to go

In horrid New Street to pour forth our woe? –

Oft – oft we’ve hoped this hour we ne’er might see,

Yet London – now at last we come to thee!

Oh! why was New Street so attractive made, –

Or why our Dad so easily betrayed?

Why heed we not as swift we ride along

The farewell peal of Highgate bells ding dong, –

Or wherefore think the flowery hedges hide, –

The grunting pigs, and fowls in speckled pride?

Why think we these less pleasing to behold

Than dirty streets which lead to houses old!

Sad was the hour and luckless was the day

When first from Bowman’s Lodge we bent our way!

‘Oh! cease our fears! all grumbling as we go,

While thought creates unnumbered scenes of woe, –

What if the mobs in all their ire we meet!

Oft in the dust we trace their crowded feet, –

And fearful – oft when day’s November light

Yields up her yellow reign to gas-lit night,

By mischief roused they scour the streets, and fly,

While radical reform is all they cry:

Before them Death with fire directs their way,

Fills the loud yell and guides them to their prey.

Sad was the hour and luckless was the day

When first from Bowman’s Lodge we bent our way.

‘At that dread hour the noise of fire shall sweep –

If aught of rest we find, upon our sleep,

Or some rude thief bounce through the window – smash –

And wake our dozings with a hideous crash,

Thrice happy they – the Catharine Street poor –

From wish of town – from dread of fire secure!

They tempt no New Street, and no thieves they find! –

No carts of goods have they – before – behind! –

Sad was the hour and luckless was the day

When first from Bowman’s Lodge we bent our way!

‘Oh! Hapless Lears! – for that your care hath won, –

The large sidegarden will be most undone! –

Big swelled our hearts, on this same mournful day

When low the plants drooped down – as thus they seemed to say; –

“Farewell! ye Lears whom fruits could not detain! –

Whom flowrets drooping buds implored in vain! –

Yet as ye go may every blow fall down,

Weak as those buds on each receiving crown, –

So may ye see nor care – nor grievous fuss, –

Nor e’re be cast to earth – to die like us! –”

Ah! might we safely to our home return –

Say to our garden – “Cease – no longer mourn! –”

Ah! might we teach our hearts to lose their fears,

And linger there our yet remaining years!’

They said – and ceased: lamenting o’er the day,

When first from Bowman’s Lodge they bent their way.

* Lear’s earliest surviving poem, written when he was 13. It is closely modelled on William Collins’s ‘Hassan – or the Camel Driver’ (1742), also 86 lines long. The Lears had been forced by financial difficulties to leave the family home, Bowman’s Lodge in Highgate.

‘When the light dies away on a calm summer’s eve’

When the light dies away on a calm summer’s eve

And the sunbeams grow faint and more faint in the west,

How we love to look on, till the last trace they leave

Glows alone like a blush upon modesty’s breast! –

Lonely streak! dearer far than the glories of day

Seems thy beauty – ‘mid silence and shadow enshrined, –

More bright as its loneliness passes away –

And leaves twilight in desolate grandeur behind! –

So when grief has made lonely and blighted our lot,

And her icy cold chain o’er our spirits has cast,

Will not memory oft turn to some thrice hallowed spot,

That shines out like a star among years that are past?

Some dream that will wake in a desolate heart,

Every chord into music that long has been hushed,

Mournful echo! – soon still – for it tolls with a smart,

That the joys which first woke it, are long ago crushed!

Ode to the little China Man

Who art thou – sweet little China Man? –

Your name I want to know

With your lovely face so pale and wan –

With a high diddle diddledy do. –

Your high cheek bones: – your screwed up mouth,

How beautiful they be! –

And your eyes that ogle from north to south,

With a high diddle diddledy dee! –

And your cultivated eyebrows too! –

That depend from either eye! –

(I’m sure it’s a fashion entirely new!) –

With a high diddle diddledy di! –

But ev’ry one – (as the Frenchman said) –

Ev’ry one to his way, –

(When he boiled in a pipkin his grandmother’s head,) –

With a high diddle diddledy da! –

Int’resting Mortal! – Whence art thou? –

In figure surpassed by few! –

Tell us thy name – is it ‘Chum-chu-wow’? –

With a high diddle diddledy du? –

The little man fetched a sort of a sneer –

As he made his sage reply –

While he twisted his eyebrow round his ear,

With a high diddle diddledy dy. –

‘Good folks’ – (and he shook his noddle-ding-dong)

‘It’s enough for you to know –

That in spite of my eyebrows – two feet long –

I’m Miss Eliza’s beau!!’ –*

* The poem was written for Eliza Drewitt, probably in 1830.

The Hens of Oripò

The Hens of Oripò*

The agèd hens of Oripò,

They tempt the stormy sea;

Black, white and brown, they spread their wings,

And o’er the waters flee;

And when a little fish they clutch

Athwart the wave so blue,

They utter forth a joyful note, –

A cock-a-doodle-doo!

O! Oo! Oripò – Oo! the hens of Oripò!

The crafty hens of Oripò,

They wander on the shore,

Where shrimps and winkles pick they up,

And carry home a store;

For barley, oats, or golden corn,

To eat they never wish,

All vegetably food they scorn,

And only seek for fish.

O! Oo! Oripò – Oo! the hens of Oripò!

The wily hens of Oripò,

Black, white and brown and gray,

They don’t behave like other hens;

In any decent way.

They lay their eggs among the rocks,

Instead of in the straw,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

O! Oo! Oripò – Oo! the hens of Oripò!

The nasty hens of Oripò,

With ill-conditioned zeal,

All fish defunct they gobble up,

At morn or evening meal.

Whereby their eggs, as now we find,

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A fishlike ancient smell and taste

Unpleasant cloth pervade.

O! Oo! Oripò – Oo! the hens of Oripò!

* An unfinished poem, written on 16 June 1848, during Lear’s Greek tour. ‘Oripò’ is the Euripos, the narrow waterway between Euboea and mainland Greece.

Limericks from A Book of Nonsense (1846 and 1855)

There was a Young Lady of Bute,

Who played on a silver-gilt flute;

She played several jigs, to her uncle’s white pigs,

That amusing Young Lady of Bute.

There was an Old Person of Chester,

Whom several small children did pester;

They threw some large stones, which broke most of his bones,

And displeased that Old Person of Chester.

There was a Young Lady whose eyes,

Were unique as to colour and size;

When she opened them wide, people all turned aside,

And started away in surprise.

There was an Old Man of Berlin,

Whose form was uncommonly thin;

Till he once, by mistake, was mixed up in a cake,

So they baked that Old Man of Berlin.

There was an Old Person of Tartary,

Who divided his jugular artery;

But he screeched to his wife, and she said, ‘Oh, my life!

Your death will be felt by all Tartary!’

There was an Old Man of Corfu,

Who never knew what he should do;

So he rushed up and down, till the sun made him brown,

That bewildered Old Man of Corfu.

There was a Young Lady of Tyre,

Who swept the loud chords of a lyre;

At the sound of each sweep, she enraptured the deep,

And enchanted the city of Tyre.

There was a Young Lady of Hull,

Who was chased by a virulent Bull;

But she seized on a spade, and called out – ‘Who’s afraid!’

Which distracted that virulent Bull.

There was an Old Person of Gretna,

Who rushed down the crater of Etna;

When they said, ‘Is it hot?’ He replied, ‘No, it’s not!’

That mendacious Old Person of Gretna.