Serious Nonsense

‘Twas’, ‘and’, ‘the’ and ‘did’ are all plain English here, and do enough work to make it clear that ‘toves’ and ‘wabe’ are nouns, ‘slithy’ an adjective, ‘gyre’ and ‘gimble’ verbs. ‘Gimble’, to take one example, is also a sort of compound or portmanteau word, mashing two others together — there’s the ghost of ‘gamble’ and ‘nimble’ so we imagine a playful, mischievous movement…

Such poetry might be useful to writers as it reminds us of Robert Frost’s concept of the ‘sound of sense’ — through the rhythm and intonation of the line, we understand the kind of thing that is being communicated.

However, making sense like this is also (in a sense) a trap, even as we’re seduced into it. Alice asks Humpty Dumpty to explain the poem, and he declares, airily, that toves are ‘something like badgers, something like lizards and something like corkscrews’ and that a rath is ‘a sort of green pig’. He is clearly making it up, trying to sound knowledgeable, as are we if we start asserting that we have decoded the poem.

Carroll’s later nonsense – his Hunting of the Snark or ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ – have an increasingly melancholy undertow. He has this in common with the other great nonsense poet — Edward Lear.

Lear is also a fascinating character — the twentieth of twenty-one children, neglected by his mother and inflicted by terrible epilepsy which always made him feel an unmarriageable outsider. He was, despite this, successful: one of the great ornithological illustrators, producing illustrations for both Gould’s famous books of birds and The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle; drawing master for Queen Victoria; and a friend and sometime member of the pre-Raphaelites. His children’s books became the most popular of their time, his limericks becoming part of nursery culture, yet thinking himself a landscape painter he gave his poems away cheaply, and ended up struggling financially and feeling a failure.

All Edward Lear’s characters seem to be oddities — defiant eccentrics, such as my beloved Jumblies, who go against all common sense in their voyage:

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!’

Edward Lear

The essayist G. K. Chesterton’s brilliant essay ‘A Defence of Nonsense’ from 1902 explains that, like Carroll, Edward Lear is ‘always introducing scraps of his own elvish dialect into the middle of simple and rational statements, until we are almost stunned into admitting that we know what they mean.’ To Chesterton something feels like ‘commonsense’ in the line from the poem ‘The Pobble Who Has No Toes’ that states: ‘Everyone knows that a Pobble is better without his toes.’

There is a tension here too though — such poems both mock our instinctive human drive towards sense-making and encourage it. Chesterton elsewhere argues that true nonsense resists analysis, claiming proudly: ‘no age except our own could have understood that the Quangle-Wangle meant absolutely nothing’ whereas if ‘The Dong with the Luminous Nose’ had appeared in the seventeenth century ‘everyone would have called it a dull satire on Oliver Cromwell.’ But then the essayist George Orwell has elsewhere claimed persuasively that ‘the whole theory of authoritarian governments is summed up in the statement that Pobbles were happier without their toes.’

Could both critics be correct? Maybe, as this brand of nonsense reveals the structures of language – particularly, in Lear and Carroll, that of reason and authority – and so can seem satirical even as it flaunts its meaninglessness. It both has and eats its (unbirthday) cake.

After pure nonsense and that which mixes neologisms in with recognisable English, there is a final type of nonsense verse, where the words are recognisable but the world is not. Take these opening lines from Edward Lear’s most famous poem, ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’:

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

Edward Lear

This poem uses words you would find in a dictionary. But its randomness plunges us into a world of dream and is seen by some as opening the door to surrealism and its plundering of the unconscious. Conversely, this type of nonsense also teaches a way of reading that is about surface, with words chosen for musicality above content.  It is ultimately up to us whether we choose a psychoanalytic reading of the ‘honey’ and ‘money’ or just notice that they rhyme. The former path leads us to the contemporary surrealists like Selima Hill, the latter to lovers of wordplay such as Matthew Welton who has said in interview ‘I’m not really interested in subject matter, I’m interested in form’. Matthew Welton’s poem ‘This is Delicious to Say’ always reminds me of the Jumblies’ Cargo with its list of foods:

Vodka, she likes. Whisky also. And plums. And limes.

And lemon-peel. Fried fruit. Dry beans. Deep soup. Warm cream.

Matthew Welton

So then. People think of nonsense poetry as trivial, but its possibilities are radical — both in its unfathomable depths and its playful surfaces. It is both deeply mysterious and profoundly shallow. Right now, I am introducing my three-year-old son to nonsense poetry, and often hear him reciting garbled scraps from the twentieth-century master Dr Seuss, particularly the tongue-twisting Fox in Socks which tells us that:

When beetles battle beetles in a puddle paddle battle

and the beetle battle puddle is a puddle in a bottle

they call this a tweetle beetle bottle puddle paddle battle muddle

AND

when beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles

and the bottle’s on a poodle and the poodle’s eating noodles

they call this a muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle bottle paddle                           battle […]

Dr Seuss

Dr Seuss, Roald Dahl, Edward Gorey, Spike Milligan — all my favourite children’s writers celebrate pure joy in language with a strong streak of nonsense, and they are starting to influence my own practice. Turning to adult poetry after a few renditions of Dr Seuss’ Fox in Socks, I am often struck by how sensible much of contemporary writing is. I can’t help thinking a bit more gimbling wouldn’t hurt.