The Columbia History of British Poetry (29 page)

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Authors: Carl Woodring,James Shapiro

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Page 123
The names of all the crew begin with
B
Bellman the captain, Baker, Butcher, Barrister, Billiard-maker, Beaverexcept one, who could not remember names. "Jabberwocky" words recur, naturalized; nonsense goes in and out of logic and mathematics. Bellman announces early on, "What I tell you three times is true"; in Fit the Fifth a circular mathematical conundrum is proved true because crucial words were said not twice but thrice. The author's preface denies nonsense in the line, ''Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes," by explaining that Bellman often had the bowsprit unshipped; nobody could remember which end of the ship it belonged to. One who accepts this explanation will understand that the world of spirits also may have an impenetrable logic.
Carroll's
Phantasmagoria
, communicating the author's genuine interest in Spiritualism, is long enough for every kind of ghost and ghoul, including an "
Inn-Spectre
," to float through it. It seems to have occurred to Barham and Hood no more than to Gay that phantoms might walk unseen in London, but in the era when the medium Daniel Dunglas Home convinced royalty and a few prominent scientists that the dead were speaking, Carroll's
Sylvie and Bruno
and its sequel traced in prose two children's encounters in the world posited by Spiritualists. Mastery of the game of nonsense continues in the song of the mad gardener:
He thought he saw a Rattlesnake
  That questioned him in Greek:
He looked again, and found it was
  The Middle of Next Week.
In 1869 and with a different illustrator in 1883 Carroll exploited in "The Lang Coortin'" an addiction to Scottish ballads:
Aye louder screamed that ladye fair
  To drown her doggie's bark;
Ever the lover shouted mair
  To make that ladye hark.
"Stolen Waters," reprinted in
Three Sunsets
(1898), engages sentimental ballads in serious rivalry. Even in double crostics Carroll remembered the relation of language to life: "A tooth-ache in each spoonful."
Next to Carroll's lawn, smooth enough for croquet and outdoor chess, Lear occupied a gardenpart anhydrous, part bog. As an
 
Page 124
ornithological and landscape painter, Lear accepted placidly what his eye told him; his verse revels in what neither his eye nor any other eye had ever seen. Yet the landscape painter peeps through, as in the portmanteau "purpledicular crags." In 1846 Lear emerged as king of poetry's most intricately foolish form, the limerick. The verses and Lear's comic illustrations exaggerate human traits and situations into absurdity. For "There was an old man in a tree" he provides a self-portrait as Humpty-Dumpty with whiskers.
In each limerick, return "to go" in the last line assures success to the sense of going nowhere; the reader enjoys an expected frustration. Lear's one concession is the occasional introduction in the last line of a characterizing adjective, "placid," "judicious," ''abstemious," "luminous," "expansive":
There was a young lady of Firle,
Whose hair was addicted to curl;
It curled up a tree, and all over the sea,
That expansive young lady of Firle.
The joke of aristocratic pronunciation echoes through the rhymes: "Moldavia""behaviour"; "Ischia""friskier"; "Janina""fanning her"; "beer""Colurnbia." Limericks before Learand most of those afterend in a third rhyme rather than in Lear's same word as above. Occasionally, Lear's joke is alliteration, as in "The New Vestments""all sorts of Beasticles, Birdlings, and Boys." Lear, like Carroll and Gilbert, delights in the grammatically and logically absurd: his pelicans sing in chorus, "We think so then, and we thought so still." Lear's drawings lend charm and credibility to unlikely rhymes: "She played on the harp, and caught several carp.")
Cruelty, recurrent in early Lear as in nursery rhymes, meets reversal in some of his later poems. The Two Old Bachelors, who interpreted a recipe as requiring them to cut up an old sage, were banged on the head with a book and in consequence "were never heard of more." Like Dodgson, Lear was a bachelor who observed and courted other people's children. A favorite line in the nursery, "And the dish ran away with the spoon," had progeny in cavorting inanimate objects throughout Lear's verse, as later in Gilbert's magnet that loved a Silver Churn (in
Patience
). But Lear and his readers prefer objects, places, and creatures nonexistent outside his verse. An exception, though hardly so for Europeans, "The Akond of Swat," provides rhymes printed like headlines
 
Page 125
for joyous choral response by hearers: "
SQUAT
," "
TROT
," "
BLOT
," "
YACHT
," ''
SHALOTT
."
The insanely happy wedding of "The Owl and the Pussy Cat," the Jumblies who went to sea in a sieve, the Nutcrackers and Sugar-Tongs that "never came back" (like all the yearned-for creatures in "Calicoe Pie"), and the several long and endless noses of the limericksLear brought all these triumphantly together in "The Dong with a Luminous Nose." Lear's biographers, Vivien Noakes and Angus Davidson, agree that irrecoverable losses in the late verses come from their author's deep despondency.
Supremacy of the absurd in Carroll and Lear left Gilbert to make the most of paradox. Gilbert's
Bab Ballads
, like a solo flute, tootles through eighty narratives the same purported disrespect for Victorian institutions as he tootles in libretti for the operas with Sullivan and other composersand in the six "Lost Babs" not reprinted from the weekly
Fun
. The "Babs," not obviously a form of literary criticism, continue the comic vein of mocking romantic, sublime, and supernatural narrative.
When Gilbert's goblin opposes the Quaint Grotesque against the ghost's Grandly Awful, the competition endsScott could not have conceived suchin a draw. With airy dislocations of syntax to create stanzas incomparably fertile in obvious rhyme, the Babs ballads reverse the recognizable psychology of occupations and typesnaval captains either serve wine and ices to the crew and provide as wives all their "sisters, cousins, aunts, and niece" (single to rhyme with Reece) or cruelly punish such misdemeanors as mutiny. Curates and vicars aspire to activities other than smoking, winking, and croquet. A duke, "mentally acuter," competes for the hand of a periwinkle seller, though "His boots are only silver, / And his underclothing pewter."
Paradox reigns, as in the revelation of
The Pirates of Penzance
that age advances at quarter speed for one born on February 29th. A bumboat woman, now seventy, called alternately Little Buttercup and Pineapple Poll, when young (at sixty) won Lieutenant Belaye though the rest of the crew were all young women in disguise. Bab cannot recommend the modesty of a couple married by telegraph "in two churches half-a-dozen miles apart." Victorian prejudices flourish in Gilbert's Christian, Anglican, imperial worldnot always as crudely as in "King Borria Bungalee Boo":
Four subjects, and all of them male,
  To Borria doubled the knee,
They were once on a far larger scale,

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