Nonsense Verse and the Child

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 workthat 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: I supposeThis 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 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 me as 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:

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...