Edward Lear's nonsense works are
distinguished by a facility of verbal
invention and a poet's delight in
the sounds of words, both real and imaginary. A stuffed rhinoceros becomes
a "diaphanous doorscraper". A "blue Boss-Woss" plunges into
"a perpendicular, spicular, orbicular, quadrangular, circular depth of
soft mud". His heroes are Quangle-Wangles, Pobbles, and Jumblies. His most
famous piece of verbal invention occurs in the closing lines of The Owl and the
Pussycat:
They dined on mince, and slices of quince
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
The "runcible spoon", a Lear neologism,
entered the language and is now found in many English dictionaries.
Limericks
are invariably typeset as five lines today, but Edward
Lear's limericks were published in a variety of formats. It appears that
Lear wrote them in manuscript basically in as many lines as there was room for
beneath the picture. In the first three editions, most are typeset as,
respectively, three, five, and three lines. The cover of one edition [1]
bears an entire limerick typeset in only two lines, thus:
There was an Old Derry down
So he made them a book, and with laughter
they shook at the fun of that Derry down
In Lear's
limericks the first and last lines
usually end with the same word, rather than rhyming.
For the most part, they are truly nonsensical and devoid of any punch line or point;
there is nothing in them to "get". They are completely free of the off-colour humour with which the verse form is
now associated.
A typical thematic element is the presence
of a callous and critical "they". An example of a typical Lear
limerick:
There was an Old Man of Aôsta,
Who possessed a large Cow, but he lost her;
But they said, 'Don't you see,
she has rushed up a tree?
You invidious Old Man of Aôsta!'
Among Lear's tremble-bembles and the
chippy-wippy-sikki-tees can be found some very felicitous turns of phrase.
Lear's self-portrait in verse, How Pleasant to know Mr. Lear, closes with
this stanza, a pleasant reference to his own
mortality:
He reads but he cannot speak Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger-beer;
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!
Edward Lear self portrait,
illustrating a real incident in which he encountered a stranger who claimed
that "Edward Lear" was merely a pseudonym. Lear (on the right) is showing the
stranger (left) the inside of his hat, with his name in the lining.
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations
related to:
Wikimedia
Commons has media related to:
Wikisource has original works written by or
about:
Retrieved from
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lear"