by Elias Bredsdorff There is no more universal poetry

Nonsense in the N ursery
by Elias Bredsdorff
‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice
remarked.
‘Oh, you ca’n’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad
here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’
‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.
‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have
come here.’
(Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland).
There is no more universal poetry than that of the nursery. Nursery verses
are learned by the child and remembered by the grown-up. However great
one’s knowledge is of the English language, of British history, politics and
institutions, there will always remain a number of obscurities for the foreigner
who has not condescended to study the literature of the nursery. Each year the
same old characters from the nursery rhymes appear on the stage in Christmas
pantomimes. The leaders of the Times abound with references to Old Mother
Hubbard, Little Miss Muffet and Jack and Jill - for they are the common heritage of all English people.
Old nursery rhymes will appear in the most unexpected places - and in the
most unexpected disguises. Recently the “National Savings Committee” issued
advertisements with the following text:
Solomon Grundy
Rich on a Monday
Spent some on Tuesday
More on Wednesday
Poor on Thursday
Worse on Friday
Broke on Saturday
Where will he end
Old Solomon Grundy?
For the “National Savings Committee” rightly assumed that every British per­
son would immediately recognize it as an “educational” parody of the old
nursery rhym e:
Elias Bredsdorff
Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
That is the end
Of Solomon Grundy.
During 1947 there were Guinness posters all over Britain, telling the public:
There was a little man,
And he felt a little glum,
He thought that a Guinness was due, due, due.
So he went to ‘The Plough’ . . .
And he’s feeling better now,
For a Guinness is good for you, you, you.
which parodies an old nursery rhyme beginning:
There was a little man, and he had a little gun,
And his bullets were made of lead, lead, lead,
He went to the brook, and shot a little duck,
Right through the middle of the head, head, head.
The Ministry of Food in an advertisement concerning the rationing of fat
repeated the first lines of the well-known nursery rhym e:
Jack Sprat
W ould eat no fat
BUT
and ‘His Majesty’s Government’ displayed in the newspapers a ‘Report to the
Nation’ (M arch 28, 1948):
W HO’LL KILL INFLATION?
I says John Bull,
I speak for the nation We’ll work with a will
And we’ll thus kill inflation.
Nonsense in the Nursery
The nursery rhyme about “Cock Robin” is, of course, easily recognized by 337
everybody.
The Bravington advertisements are known by everybody who has travelled
by Underground in London:
Mary, M ary, quite contrary,
How does your romance go ?
A boy, a girl, a Bravington ring,
And bridesmaids all in a row.
Many other examples could be added. The nursery rhymes “stay with us
throughout our lives, remembered even in the heat of parliamentary debate, so
that the Chancellor of the Exchequer finds himself compared with ‘Little Jack
H orner’, the Minister of Supply is likened to ‘Little Bo-peep’, and Mr. Churchill’s fall is unkindly placed with Humpty Dumpty’s” - to quote the Introduction to The Oxford Dietionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951).
*
The field of nursery rhymes is a vast one. It comprises lullabies, riddles, tonguetwisters, rhyming alphabets, prayers and religious verses, sentimental verse
stories, educational poems, fairy tales, etc., etc. It ranges from “Mary had a
little lam b” to this intimidating lullaby:
Baby, baby, naughty baby,
Hush, you squalling thing, I say.
Peace this moment, peace, or maybe
Bonaparte 1 will pass this way.
But let us leave the preachers and the teachers, the sentimentalists and the
fairy-tale tellers, and walk into an enclosure within the field of nursery rhymes,
a little odd world of its own where everything seems to have been turned upside
down; it is what Emile Cammaerts calls “the realm of Topsy-turvydom, in
which cockle-shells grow in the garden, barbers shave pigs and unicorns are
fed on bread and plum-cake” {The Poetry o f Nonsense, 1926). Even the cheapest
Woolworth anthology of English nursery verse will supply examples of pure,
delightful Nonsense. The best-known English lullaby places the cradle in the
tree top:
1. For ’Bonaparte’ other names have been inserted at various times, e.g. ’Menshikov’ (Russian Commander in the Crimean War) and ’Black Old Knoll’ (Oliver Cromwell). - An
even more terrifying example of nursery rhyme is found in James Janeway, a Nonconformist preacher, author of A Token for Children, who wrote, in 1670, about children: They are not too little to go to Hell.
Elias Bredsdorff
338
Hush-a-bye, baby, on the tree top,
When the wind blows the cradle will rock . . .
And what is probably the best-known nonsense verse in English altogether is
this old anonymous nursery rhyme:
Hey diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed
To see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
One cannot help noticing how well it fits in with another rhyme, with which it
has nothing to d o :
We are all in the dumps,
For diamonds are trumps;
The kittens are gone to St. Paul’s!
The babies are bit,
The moon’s in a fit,
And the houses are built without walls.
The rhyme is the master of the verse, which is as it should be, for this is a
prerogative of Nonsense Poetry:
One, two,
Buckle my shoe;
Three, four,
Knock at the door;
Five, six,
Pick up sticks;
etc.
The famous old song of the church bells of London is another example of this :
Oranges and lemons,
Say the bells of St. Clement’s.
You owe me five farthings,
Say the bells of St. M artin’s.
When will you pay me ?
Say the bells of Old Bailey.
Nonsense in the Nursery
When I grow rich,
339
Say the bells of Shoreditch.
When will that be ?
Say the bells of Stepney.
I’m sure I don’t know,
Says the great bell at Bow.
Here comes a candle to light you to bed,
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head.
Indeed, an unexpected rhyme may be the whole joke, as in this jingle:
W hat is the rhyme for porringer ?
What is the rhyme for porringer ?
The king he had a daughter fair
And gave the Prince of Orange her.
The nonsensical element may be due either to the utter improbability of the
story or to its idiotic obviousness. Two examples may be given, both con­
cerning old women. First, an example of the nonsense of improbability:
There was an old woman tossed up in a basket,
Seventeen times as high as the m oon;
Where she was going I couldn’t but ask it,
For in her hand she carried a broom . . .
The answer is that she is “going up so high, to brush the cobwebs off the
sky.” The second example illustrates the nonsense of obviousness:
There was an old woman
Lived under a hill,
And if she’s not gone
She lives there still.
Meaningless noises are loved for their own sake:
Intery, mintery, cutery, corn,
Apple seed and briar thorn . . .
Meaningless words abound particularly in children’s counting-out formulae:
Eena, meena, mina, mo,
Catch a nigger by his toe;
Elias Bredsdorff
340
If he squeals, then let him go,
Eena, meena, mina, mo.
True enough, philologists can inform us that East Anglian shepherds still count
their sheep, “Ina, mina, tethera, methera, pin, sithera, lithera, cothra, hothra,
dic”, so that the meaningless words are but relics of ancient numerals. But to
children using this old rhyme (the second line of which is an American corruption of about a hundred years ago) the words have become pure and harmonious nonsense. Exactly the same thing applies to another well-known counting-out rhym e:
Hickory, dickory, dock,
The mouse ran up the clock.
The clock struck one,
The mouse ran down,
Hickory, dickory, dock,
the first and last lines of which are clearly reminiscent of the tellings-numbers
used by Westmorland shepherds: “Hevera” ( 8), “Devera” (9) and “Dick” (10).
But to most of us the sounds have now become just as nonsensical noises as
they have even to philologists, in a third counting-out formula:
One-ery, two-ery, ickery, Ann,
Phillisy, phollisy, Nicholas John,
Quever, quaver, Irish Mary,
Stickeram, stackeram, buck,
the origin of which should probably be sought in antiquity.
Or let us choose another example of the deterioration of meaning in nursery
rhymes. There seems good reason to believe that the verse about Jack Horner
was originally a political satire, directed against a certain Thomas Horner,
steward to Richard Whiting, the last abbot of Glastonbury. For the story goes
that at the time of the Dissolution the abbot, perhaps hoping to appease Henry
VIII, sent his steward to London with a Christmas pie for the King, and in this
pie were hidden the deeds of twelve manors. On the journey Mr. Horner is said
to have opened the pie and extracted the deeds of the Manor of Melis. But the
satire has been forgotten, and for four centuries English children have happily
repeated the old rhyme, which has to them all the virtues of a nonsense verse:
Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner,
Eating his Christmas pie;
Nonsense in the Nursery
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said, W hat a good boy am I !
Happily ignorant that “Jumping Joan” was the term of an ill-reputed lady in
Stuart times, children repeat what was once a bawdy quip, but has become an
example of nonsensical obviousness, a truism:
Here am I,
Little Jumping Joan;
When nobody’s with me
I’m all alone.
Lucy Locket and Kitty Fisher may well have been “two celebrated courtesans
of the time of Charles II” , as J. O. Halliwell suggests (The Nursery Rhymes of
England, 1846), but they have now become respectable characters in the N ur­
sery World of Nonsense:
Lucy Locket lost her pocket,
Kitty Fisher found it;
N ot a penny was there in it,
Only ribbon round it.
And what was once a very rude jest has now become an innocent little rhyme,
completely severed from any indecent associations:
Little Robin Redbreast
Sat upon a rail;
Niddle noddle went his head,
Wiggle waggle went his tail.
Thus we find that many jingles which were not written as nonsense rhymes have
become so by losing their original associations. People who have delved into the
history of individual nursery rhymes will have us believe that “Little Boy Blue”
was intended to represent Cardinal Wolsey; that “Curly loclcs” may have referred to Charles II; that the famous “Doctor Foster” who “went to Gloucester
in a shower of rain” describes an incident in the travels of Edward I; and that
“Mary, Mary, quite contrary” , in whose garden were “silver bells and cockle
shells, and pretty maids all in a row” , refers to Mary, Queen of Scots, whose
gay manners and Popish inclinations had displeased John Knox. Sometimes
many different theories are advanced. The jingle about “Georgie Porgie” is an
example:
341
Elias Bredsdorff
342
Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie,
Kissed the girls and made them cry;
When the boys came out to play,
Georgie Porgie ran away,
for some say that George I is portrayed, others mention George Villiers, Duke
of Buckingham, and others again Charles II.
It is a bit of an anticlimax to be told, after reading “Hey diddle diddle”,
that “the cat and the fiddle” may not be a cat or a fiddle at all, but may instead
by an English corruption of Catherine la fidele, meaning Catherine of Aragon,
the first of Henry VIIFs many wives. (A similar English corruption has transformed the French Infant au Castille to the wonderfully nonsensical place
name of ‘Elephant and Castle’.) Even Old King Cole becomes a true historical
king if we believe the Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester and the Chronicle of
Brut, which we had better not. He lived, so we are told, in the 3rd century A.D.,
and was the first Earl of Colchester (“And Colchestre after his name i-clept is
ich understonde”), but after “a gret warre” he became king of England. Ac­
cording to Geoffrey of Monmouth (1147) he had a daughter Helen, who was
skilled in music - so that may account for “his fiddlers three” ! And what about
the heroine of this little story ?
Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey;
There came a big spider,
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.
Well, we are told by some people that Miss Muffet’s Christian name was
Patience, and that she was the daughter of an entomologist called Dr. Thomas
Muffet (died 1604), a man ‘whose admiration for spiders has never been surpassed’. If that is true, we can only conclude that his daughter did not share his
enthusiasm.
Concerning “Who killed Cock Robin” there appear to be two schools of
thought; one school believes that it is about the intrigues attending the downfall of Robert Walpole’s ministry in 1742, whereas another school believes it to
be much more ancient, in faet a deteriorated version of the Norse myth of the
death of Balder. Similarly, the theory was put forward by the Rev. S. BaringGould in Curious Myths o f the Middle Ages (1866) that the nursery rhyme which
begins:
Nonsense in the Nursery
Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water;
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after . . .
refers to the ancient Eddaic characters Hjuki and Bil.
One of the old favourites of the nursery has worried many people:
Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye;
Four and twenty blackbirds,
Baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened,
The birds began to sing;
Was not that a dainty dish,
To set before the king?
The king was in his counting-house,
Counting out his money;
The queen was in the parlour,
Eating bread and honey.
The maid was in the garden,
Hanging out the clothes,
There came a little blackbird,
And snapped off her nose.
It is a perfect gem of a nonsense verse, whatever its origin may have been, and
no one seems to know, for The Oxford Dietionary o f Nursery Rhymes says,
having disproved a frequently advanced theory that the song was written by
George Steevens: “Other stories, giving the rhyme allegorical significance, are
not so easy to disprove. Theories upon which too much ink has been expended
are (i) that the twenty-four blackbirds are the hours of the day; the king, the
sun; the queen the moon, etc.; (ii) that the blackbirds are the choirsof aboutto-be-dissolved monasteries making a dainty pie for Henry; the queen, Catherine; the maid, Anne Boleyn, &c.; (iii) that the king, again, is Henry V III; the
rye, tribute in kind; the birds, twenty-four manorial title-deeds presented under
a crust, &c.; (iv) that the maid is the sinner; the blackbird, the demon snapping
off the maid’s nose to reach her soul, &c.; (v) that the printing of the English
343
Elias Bredsdorff
344 Bible is celebrated, blackbirds being the letters of the alphabet which were
‘baked in a pie’ when set up by the printers in pica form, &c.”
And thus we can continue. The baby rocked on a tree top has been recognized by some as the Egyptian child Horus, by others as the Old Pretender,
and by others again as a New England Red Indian. Take your choice!
“It should be stated straightway that the bulk of these speculations are
worthless,” say the editors of The Oxford Dietionary o f Nursery Rhymes in
their admirable introduction - and so we are back in the realm of Topsy-turvydom once more again.
Let us try, then, to find our own way in the Kingdom of Nonsense and
study the social manners, philosophy and current affairs of the place. The
topical events are extraordinary:
W hat’s the news of the day,
Good neighbour, I pray?
They say the balloon
Is gone up to the moon.
Biology is taught from a new angle:
What are little boys made of?
What are little boys made of?
Frogs and snails,
And puppy-dogs’ tails,
That’s what little boys are made of.
W hat are little girls made of?
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice
And all that’s nice,
That’s what little girls are made of.
Religious history is not excluded as a subject:
Said Aaron to Moses,
‘Let’s cut off our noses.’
Said Moses to Aaron,
‘It’s the fashion to wear ’em.’
Here is another example:
St. Dunstan, as the story goes,
Once pulled the devil by his nose,
Nonsense in the Nursery
With red hot tongs, which made him roar,
That could be heard ten miles or more.
When things are small they are exceedingly small:
There was an old woman called Nothing-at-all,
Who lived in a dwelling exceedingly small;
A man stretched his mouth to its utmost extent,
And down at one gulp house and old woman went.
And when things are big, they are exceedingly big, as in the song “As I was
going to Derby”, in which a big ram is described in these terms:
The wool upon his back, sir,
Reached up unto the sky,
The eagles built their nests there,
For I heard the young ones cry . . .
or as in this extravagant verse of hypothetical ‘greatness’:
If all the seas were one sea,
What a great sea that would be!
If all the trees were one tree,
What a great tree that would be!
And if all the axes were one axe,
W hat a great axe that would be!
And if all the men were one man,
W hat a great man that would be!
And if the great man took the great axe,
And cut down the great tree,
And let it fall into the great sea!
What a splish-splash that would be!
Altogether, the so-called ‘happy medium’ is unknown in this world of extrem es:
There was a little girl, and she had a little curl
Right in the middle of the forehead;
When she was good, she was very, very good,
But when she was bad, she was horrid,
a favourite rhyme, which may or may not have been written by Longfellow.
The inhabitants of the World of Nonsense behave very strangely:
Elias Bredsdorff
346
The barber shaved the mason,
As I suppose,
Cut off his nose,
And popped it in a basin.
Or was it ‘the Quaker’ whose nose he ‘lap’t up in a paper’ ? It doesn’t matter.
Serves them right, anyway! Here is a story of three odd characters:
Rub-a-dub-dub,
Three men in a tub,
And how do you think they got there ?
The butcher, the baker,
The candlestick-maker,
They all jumped out of a rotten potato,
’Twas enough to make a man stare.
’Twas enough, indeed! But nothing seems impossible in this world:
There was a man of Thessaly,
And he was wondrous wise,
He jumped into a bramble bush
And scratched out both his eyes.
And when he saw his eyes were out,
With all his might and main
He jumped into another bush
And scratched them in again.
Even the laws of time have been suspended:
There was a little one-eyed gunner,
Who killed all the birds that died last summer.
The sequence of events follows its own logic:
Anna Elise, she jumped with surprise;
The surprise was so quick, it played her a trick;
The trick was so rare, she jumped in a chair;
The chair was so frail, she jumped in a pail;
The pail was so wet, she jumped in a net;
The net was so small, she jumped on the ball;
The ball was so round, she jumped on the ground;
And ever since then she’s been turning around.
Nonsense in the Nursery
The moon plays an important part in nonsense verse, and so does the Man in 347
the M oon:
The man in the moon,
Came down too soon,
And asked his way to Norwich;
He went by the south,
And burnt his mouth
With supping cold plum porridge.
Among the venerable inhabitants of the Nonsense World are such characters
as ‘Old Mother Shuttle’, who “lived in a coal-scuttle, along with her dog and
her cat” , and ‘Old Mother Hubbard’, who “went to the cupboard, to fetch
her poor dog a bone” , but whenever she came back from having bought
something for the dog, he behaved in the most extraordinary way: first the
dog “was dead”, then he “was laughing”, “was smoking a pipe”, “sat in a
chair”, “stood on his head”, “was playing the flute” , “was riding a goat”,
“was feeding the cat”, and so on, until finally she found him “dressed in her
clothes” . The end of the story is that,
The dame made a curtsy,
The dog made a bow ;
The dame said, Your servant,
The dog said, Bow-wow.
Here we find, too, the ‘Three wise men of Gotham’, who “went to sea in a
bowl” , and ‘Simple Simon’, who did so many other silly things besides going
“to look if plums grew on a thistle” , and we hear how
Yankee Doodle came to town,
Riding on a pony;
He stuck a feather in his cap
And called it macaroni.
Just to make things more difficult we are told that,
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper,
or somebody will assure us, without any other reason than a wish to twist our
tongues that,
I need not your needles, they’re needless to me;
For kneading of needles were needless, you see;
Elias Bredsdorff
348
But did my neat trousers but need to be kneed,
I then should have need of your needles indeed.
Even Sense puts on the camouflage of Nonsense in order to be tolerated:
I saw a fishpond all on fire
I saw a house bow to a squire
I saw a parson twelve feet high
I saw a cottage near the sky
I saw a balloon made of lead
I saw a coffin drop down dead
I saw two sparrows run a race
I saw two horses making lace
I saw a girl just like a cat
I saw a kitten wear a hat
I saw a man who saw these too
And said though strange they all were true.
“So may the omission of a few commas effect a wonder in the imagination,”
says the poet-guide of Come Hither. Recite the following text to an unitiated
English child, and it will believe the lines to be Latin, although they are, in
faet, proper English:
In fir tar is,
In oak none is,
In mud ells are,
In clay none are.
Goat eat ivy;
Mare eat oats.
The joke, we are told, may be traced back 500 years to a medical manuscript
of Henry VI’s time.
The real point of a nonsense story may well be its lack of a point:
There was an old man,
And he had a calf,
And that’s half;
He took him out of the stall,
And put him on the wall,
And that’s all.
Nonsense in the Nursery
Lyrics and Nonsense may go very well together, as we can see in the old chant
beginning “The first day of Christmas” , which is first found in a diminutive
children’s book entitled Mirth without Mischief, published in London about
1780. This strangely mystical and nonsensical poem might very well have been
included in The Oxford Book o f English Verse. The last of its twelve stanzas is
quoted here:
The twelfth day of Christmas,
My true love sent to me
Twelve lords a leaping,
Eleven ladies dancing,
Ten pipers piping,
Nine drummers drumming,
Eight maids a milking,
Seven swans a swimming,
Six geese a laying,
Five gold rings,
Four colly birds,
Three French hens,
Two turtle doves, and
A partridge in a pear tree.
“The meaning of it, if it has any, has yet to be satisfactorily explained,” says
The Oxford Dictionary o f Nursery Rhymes.
In taking leave of the old anonymous nursery rhymes let me quote one
final example from the strange borderland between Sense and Nonsense:
If all the world were paper,
And all the sea were ink,
If all the trees were bread and cheese,
W hat should we have to drink?
*
“One wonders who they all were, those anonymous authors whose midget
verses are so much more familiar than the solemnities of a Milton or a Wordsworth,” writes Miss V. Sackville-West in her little book Nursery Rhymes (Lon­
don, 1947). Only in very few cases are we able to trace the authorship. We do
know, for instance, that Dr. Johnson contributed one item to the nursery
rhymes:
If a man who turnips cries,
Cry not when his father dies,
Elias Bredsdorff
350
It is proof that he would rather
Have a turnip than his father.
But Boswell is snooty about it and calls these lines “namby pamby rhymes”,
and Dr. Johnson seems to have written them just to prove how easy it was to
play with words.
Oliver Goldsmith, too, was a great lover of nursery rhymes, and his comic
ballads, especially the Elegy o f a Mad Dog, contain various elements of non­
sense, particularly by his deliberate over-emphasis of platitudes:
Let us lament in sorrow sore,
For Kent Street well may say,
That had she lived a twelvemonth more, She had not died today.
Charles Lamb wrote some good nonsense verse, too, such as the verse begin­
ning:
Lazy-bones, lazy-bones, wake up and peep!
The cat’s in the cupboard, your mother’s asleep.
There you sit snoring, forgetting her ills;
Who is to give her her Bolus and Pills ?
Twenty-fine Angels must come into town,
All for to help you to make your new gown . . .
which ends as follows:
Gårdener gratuitous, careless of pelf,
Leave her to water her lily herself,
Or to neglect it to death if she choose it;
Remember the loss is her own if she lose it.
There is plenty of evidence that Lamb was a great lover of old nursery rhymes.
In the Autobiography o f Benjamin Robert Haydon (1853) there is a charming
little story of a certain party held on December 28, 1817; the guests included
Wordsworth, Keats, Lamb and a Comptroller of Stamps who was a bore. The
comptroller annoyed the company by his very silly questions, and in the end
Lamb turned his back on the poor man, and at every question of the comptrol­
ler he chanted:
Diddle, diddle dumpling, my son John
Went to bed with his breeches on,
an old nursery rhyme which continues:
Nonsense in the Nursery
One shoe off, and one shoe on,
Diddle, diddle dumpling, my son John,
which jingle seems to have been a favourite of Lamb’s.
There is, of course, plenty of deliberate nonsense in some of Shakespeare’s
plays, especially in his minor characters, such as Launce, the two Gobbos,
Dogberry and Verges, and the Grave-diggers, but most of it is prose, and none
of it is of the nursery kind. However, Shakespeare seems to allude to the
nursery rhyme “Ding, dong, bell, Pussy’s in the well” in The Taming o f the
Shrew, and the refrain “Ding, dong, bell” appears both in The Merchant o f
Veniee and The Tempest. In the Introduction to The Oxford Dietionary of
Nursery Rhymes it is stated that “there are reasons for supposing that he
(Shakespeare) refers to two rhymes known in the present nursery, and to one
other now obsolete; that he knew six others, at least in embryo, and was
familar with a book which contains several popular riddles.”
Nonsense verse could also be found in Chaucer, Samuel Butler (“Hudibras”), Swift, Pope, and others, but rarely of a kind that would appeal to
children. I should like to recommend Sir Edmund Strachey’s essay Nonsense as
a Fine Art (the Quarterly Review, 1888, pp. 335-366), which contains a more
thorough examination of this subject.
*
The modern school of nonsense poetry may be said to descend from the two
greatest nonsense writers who have ever lived, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.
But they again are both greatly indebted to the old anonymous nonsense
rhymes of the nursery.
Lear admits that his first attempts as a nonsense poet were inspired by an
old anonymous nursery limerick which runs:
There was an old man of Tobago,
Who lived on rice, gruel, and sago;
Till, much to his bliss,
His physician said this To a leg, sir, of mutton you may go.
This famous limerick, mentioned by Dickens in Our Mutual Friend, is probably
the oldest limerick known in English, and it was acknowledged by Lear as the
rhyme which served him as a model for the verses in his first Book o f Nonsense
(1846).
Lewis Carroll’s two Alices are greatly inspired by traditional nursery rhy­
mes. It is true that in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) only one nur-
Elias Bredsdorjj
352 sery rhyme is quoted, the one about the Queen of Hearts; but the characters
from this rhyme people nearly half the book. And in Through the LookingGlass (1871) there are several nursery rhymes: Tweedledum and Tweedledee,
Humpty Dumpty, the Lion and the Unicom, the parody of “Rock a-bye
baby” , and a mention of “Here we go round the mulberry bush” . A brief
extract from a long parody of Swinburne’s By the North Sea in Sylvie and
Bruno Coneluded will show the importance of traditional nursery rhymes for
Carroll’s verse:
Let us drench him, from toplet to toelet,
With Nursery Songs!
‘He shall muse upon “Hey! Diddle! Diddle!”
On the Cow that surmounted the Moon:
He shall rave of the Cat and the Fiddle,
And the Dish that eloped with the Spoon:
And his soul shall be sad for the Spider
When Miss Muffet was sipping her whey,
That so tenderly sat down beside her
And scared her away!’
Both Lear and Carroll wrote for the enjoyment of children, Lear for the Earl
of Derby’s grandchildren, Lewis Carroll for Alice Liddell. And both writers
have long ago become classics with children and grown-ups alike.
Edward Lear has been termed ‘the Laureate of Nonsense’, a title he certainly deserves. It may be worth recalling that his father was a stockbroker of
Danish descent, and that he had also some Irish blood in his veins. “So,
remembering Hans Andersen who was a Dane, and the supposed humour of
Ireland, one may argue that Danish and Irish blood is a good mixture for the
production of that kind of humorous fantasy which he called nonsense,”
says Holbrook Jackson in his introduction to The Complete Nonsense of
Edward Lear (1947).
Emile Cammaerts comments rightly about Lear’s nonsense verses: “They
do not contain any sparkling witticism or any striking caricature, still less any
worldly wisdom. They are just sheer nonsense, and, unless we enjoy nonsense
for nonsense’s sake, we shall never be able to appreciate them” (The Poetry of
Nonsense, p. 7).
Among Lear’s innumerable nonsense limericks, each of which was illustrated by himself, only a few can be quoted here. This one may serve as an
example of many of them:
Nonsense in the Nursery
There was a Young Lady of Norway,
353
Who casually sat in a doorway;
When the door squeezed her flat, she exclaimed ‘What of that ?’
This courageous Young Lady of Norway.
From a purely technical point of view Lear’s limericks are not very good. The
last line, which in the best of limericks brings in a new and surprising twist to
the story, is, in Lear’s case, often just a repetition of the first line, with the
addition of some startling and often nonsensical adjective, e. g. “That wayward Old Man of Kilkenny”, “That intrinsic Old Man of Peru” , “That ombliferous person of Crete”, “That borascible person of Bangor”, “That
umbrageous Old Person of Spain” .
As in the nursery rhymes proper the nonsensical element may be due
either to utter improbalility, as in the following example,
There was an Old Man who said, ‘Hush!
I perceive a young bird in this bush!’
When they said - ‘Is it small ?’ He replied - ‘Not at all!
It is four times as big as the bush!’
or to its idiotic obviousness, as in this example,
There was an Old Man of th’Abruzzi,
So blind that he couldn’t his foot see;
When they said, ‘That’s your toe,’ he replied, ‘Is it so?’
That doubtful Old Man of th’Abruzzi.
Lear’s limericks have many admirers, both inside and outside the nursery, but
personally I find them a little monotonous, and I would consider most of his
other nonsense poems as being far superior to his limericks. “The Owl and the
Pussy-Cat”, for instance, is a perfect example of charming nonsense. We are
told that after the Owl and the Pussy-Cat have been married by the Turkey,
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.
Elias Bredsdorfj
354 Other delightful poems are “The Duck and the Kangaroo”, “Calico Pie” and
“The Jumblies” , with its nostalgie refrain:
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.
Lear’s fantastic creatures live on in the minds of children and grown-ups the Quangle Wangle, the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo, and the Pobble who had no
toes. In the case of the latter one is never likely to forget the wise words of his
Aunt Jobisca:
‘It’s faet the whole world knows,
The Pobbles are happier without their toes.’
Best of all is perhaps the Dong with the Luminous N ose:
Slowly it wanders, - pauses, - creeps, Anon it sparkles, - flashes and leaps;
And ever as onward it gleaming goes
A light on the Bong-tree stem it throws.
And those who watch at that midnight hour
From Hall or Terrace, or lofty Tower,
Cry, as the wild light passes along, ‘The Dong! - the Dong!
‘The wandering Dong through the forest goes!
‘The Dong! the Dong!
‘The Dong with a luminous Nose!’
G. K. Chesterton admired this poem so greatly that he wrote: “‘The Dong
with the Luminous Nose’, at least, is original, as the first ship and the first
plough were original.” (A Defence o f Nonsense. In The Defendant, 1901.)
We can see from his letters how Lear was constantly brimming over with
nonsense. On January 18, 1858, he wrote: “I meant to have written a lot about
the priests and the signori, and the good peasantry, and the orange-trees, and
the sea-gulls, and geraniums, and the Ionian Ball, and Jerusalem Artichokes,
and Colonel Paterson, and old Dandolo’s palm-tree, and my spectacles, and
the East-wind, and Zambelli’s nasty little dogs, and fishermen, and Scarpe’s
cats, and whatnot, but I am too sleepy.”
Lear’s striking self-portrait deserves to be quoted, although there is no
nonsense in these lines, for they are a statement of truth:
Nonsense in the Nursery
His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big;
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard it resembles a wig.
There is a very great difference between the nonsense of Lear and that of Lewis
Carroll. Lear’s nonsense is pure nonsense, Vart pour Vart, whereas Lewis
Carroll’s nonsense may be characterized as logic gone wrong; “his Wonderland is a country populated by insane mathematicians”, says G. K. Chesterton and adds that “we might discover that Humpty Dumpty and the March
Hare were Professors of Philosophy and Doctors of Divinity enjoying a mental
holiday.” (A Defenee o f Nonsense.) After all, we must not forget that Lewis
Carroll was identical with C. L. Dodgson, an Oxford don, a elever mathematician and logician, who could combine his two egos in his so-called “Symbolic Logic”, an example of which may be given here:
(1) No one, who is going to a party, ever fails to brush his hair;
(2) No one looks fascinating, if he is untidy;
(3) Opium-eaters have no self-command;
(4) Every one, who has brushed his hair, looks fascinating;
(5) No one wears white kid gloves, unless he is going to a party;
( 6) A man is always untidy, if he has no self-command.
From which the following deduction can be m ade:
Opium-eaters never wear white kid-gloves.
This looks as nonsense, but is, in faet, logic.
But the prose of Lewis Carroll falls outside the scope of this article, which
is only concerned with nonsense verse, and most of his nonsense writing is
prose. In his two Aliees there are, however, scattered about several nonsense
verses. In Aliee’s Adventures in Wonderland nine different verses are included,
namely (1) “How doth the little crocodile” (parodying Isaac W atts’s “How
doth the little busy bee”), (2) “Fury said to a mouse”, (3) “You are old, Father
William” (parodying Southey’s “The Old Man’s Comforts”), (4) “Speak
roughly to your little boy”, (5) “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat” (parodying Jane
Taylor’s “Twinkle, twinkle, little star”), ( 6) “Will you walk a little faster?” ,
(7) “’Tis the voice of the Lobster” (parodying Isaac W atts’s “’Tis the voice of
the sluggard”), ( 8) “Beautiful Soup”, and (9) “They told me you had been to
her” . In Through the Looking-Glass seven different nonsense verses are in­
cluded, viz. (1) “Jabberwocky” , (2) “The Walrus and the Carpenter”, (3)
Elias Bredsdorff
356 “In winter, when the fields are white” , (4) “I’ll teil thee everything I can”
(parodying Wordsworth’s Resolution and Independence), (5) “Hush-a-bye,
lady, in Alice’s lap!” (parodying the nursery rhyme “Hush-a-bye, baby, on
the tree top”), (6) “To the Looking-Glass world it was Alice that said” (paro­
dying Bonnie Dundee), and (7) “First the fish must be caught” . No less than
seven of the sixteen sets of verses are parodies, a literary form which falls outside the field of nonsense proper.
There is, I believe, general agreement that Carroll’s best nonsense verses
are those included in Through the Looking-Glass, and among them “Jabberwocky” holds a very special place as being, undoubtedly, the best gibberish
poem in the English language (if we can call it that). Tens of thousands of
children and grown-ups know it by heart and are able to recite:
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe,
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
Later in the book Humpty Dumpty explains the gibberish words of the first
stanza, and if we use his explanations we might translate the first stanza into
something like this:
“It was about four o’clock in the afternoon, and the lithe and slimy animals which are something like badgers - something like lizards - and some­
thing like corkscrews, went round and round like a gyroscope and made holes
like a gimlet in the grass-plot round a sun-dial. The thin, shabby-looking
birds with feathers sticking out all round like a live mop, were all flimsy and
miserable, and the green pigs which had lost their way were making a noise
between bellowing and whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle.”
No, no, I prefer the poem to the annotated edition! And there have been
other commentators, trying to do better than Carroll. In his book of essays
entitled Here, There and Everywhere (1950) Eric Partridge includes an essay on
The Nonsense Words o f Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, in which he subjects
“Jabberwocky” to a careful linguistic analysis. He arrives at the conclusion
that of the 28 gibberish words in the entire poem, 4 are revivals of existing
Nonsense in the Nursery
words, 6 are merely fanciful and arbitrary, 3 are what he calls ‘cold-in-the- 357
head (or adenoidal) words’, and the rest he classifies, a little vaguely, as “no
less entertaining and ingenious” . But his interpretation differs from that of
Humpty Dumpty, and if we look up Elizabeth Sewell’s book The Field of
Nonsense (1952), we will find a third interpretation! The word ’frumious’,
which, according to Humpty Dumpty, is a “portmanteau-word” meaning
‘furious + fuming’, is explained by Eric Partridge as “frumpish + gloomy”
and by Miss Sewell as being associated with “fume, with a connection with
French brume and English brumous, frumenty, rheumy” . Well, they seem to me
all to add to the nonsense, for is not the real charm of “Jabberwocky” that the
poem sounds so perfectly English without meaning anything in the world, or,
if we prefer to put it that way, in spite of the faet that it can mean anything we
like?
Closer parallels to the prose nonsense of Lewis Carroll are found in such
wonderful verses as “The Walrus and the Carpenter” and the verses with the
chorus hails Queen Alice:
Then fill up the glasses as quick as you can,
And sprinkle the table with buttons and bran:
Put cats in the coffee, and mice in the tea And welcome Queen Alice with thirty-times-three!
“The Hunting of the Snark” and “Sylvie and Bruno”, too, would supply
many excellent examples of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense verses.
“We fancy that if the account of the knave’s trial in ‘Alice in W onderland’
had been published in the seventeenth century it would have been bracketed
with Bunyan’s ‘Trial of Faithful’ as a parody on the State prosecutions of the
time. We fancy that if ‘The Dong with the Luminous Nose’ had appeared in
the same period everyone would have called it a dull satire on Oliver Cromwell,” writes G. K. Chesterton in A Defenee of Nonsense. His thesis is that
only the generations after Lear and Carroll have been able to appreciate
nonsense as an art in itself. Satire and wit have been appreciated throughout
the centuries, but, he says, “There is all the difference in the world between the
instinct of satire, which, seeing in the Kaiser’s moustaches something typical
of him, draws them continually larger and larger; and the instinct of nonsense
which, for no reason whatever, imagines what those moustaches would look
like on the present Archbishop of Canterbury if he grew them in a fit of ab­
sence of mind.”
Elias Bredsdorff
358
This characterization, I think, fits in excellently with many of the best
English nonsense poets after Lear and Carroll.
For in the wake of these two great writers followed a host of nonsense
poets; in reference books they are labelled as novelists, short story-writers,
essayists, playwrights or poets, for with most of them nonsense verse was a
sideline or a delightful hobby. The list includes such men as C. S. Calverley,
W. S. Gilbert, Cosmo Monkhouse, Rudyard Kipling, Hilaire Belloc, G. K.
Chesterton, E. C. Bentley, A. A. Milne, Gelett Burgess, Harry Graham and
Ogden Nash. Several of their nonsense verses are far too sophisticated (and in
some cases far too Rabelaisian) to be understood by children, but most of
these writers have, like Lear and Carroll, been inspired by children of their
acquaintance. Kipling, for instance, wrote his Just so Stories in answer to his
‘Best Belovedest’s’
One million Hows, two million Wheres,
And seven million Whys.
As an example of the nonsense element in some of Charles Stuart Calverley’s
poems I shall quote the last stanza of his poem “A Tale of a Grandfather” :
Was I haply the lady’s suitor?
Or her uncle ? I can’t make out Ask your governess, dears, or tutor,
For myself, I’m in hopeless doubt
As to why we were there, who on earth we were,
And what this is all about.
W. S. Gilbert wrote a number of irrational verses, of which the following may
serve as an example:
Strike the concertina’s melancholy string!
Blow the spirit-stirring harp like anything!
Let the piano’s m artial blast
Rouse the echoes of the past,
For the AGIB, Prince of Tartary, I sing!
Of AGIB, who, amid Tartaric scenes,
Wrote a lot of ballet-music in his teens:
His gentle spirit rolls
In the melody of souls Which is pretty, - but I don’t know what it means.
Nonsense in the Nursery
The history of the limerick falls to some extent inside the scope of the present
investigation - but only to some extent. It is true that the limerick is primarily
a vehicle of nonsense, but as the majority of limericks (and often the best ones)
are unprintable it follows that they are not exactly meant for the nursery. And
many of those which are printable are so subtle or so sophisticated in their
jokes that children fail to understand them. Emile Cammaerts rightly observes
that “for many foreigners, Einstein’s theories present fewer difficulties than
certain limericks” - and for many English children the two things would be
equally unintelligible. All the same, there are several limericks which have
also become favourites among children. Cosmo Monkhouse might be taken
here as a representative of limerick writers, for he wrote that delightful one
which has become a classic:
There was a young lady of Niger,
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger.
They came from the ride
With the lady inside
And the smile on the face of the tiger.
Here are a few other limericks from Cosmo Monkhouse’s Nonsense Rhymes:
There once was a girl of Lahore
The same shape behind as before;
As no one knew where
To olfer a chair
She had to sit down on the floor.
There was an old party of Lyme,
Who married three wives at one time.
When asked, “Why the third?”
He replied, “One’s absurd,
And bigamy, sir, is a crime!”
Among the innumerable anonymous limericks only a few can be mentioned here.
The following may be taken as representative of a special kind where the joke
depends on the eye, not on the ear, so that the limerick becomes, in faet, a
comment on the nonsensical spelling of the English language:
The lifeboat that’s kept at Torquay
Is intended to float in the suay:
359
Elias Bredsdorff
360
The crew and the coxswain
Are sturdy as oxswain
And as smart and as brave as can buay.
Many people would regard this anonymous limerick as their favourite:
There was an old man of Khartoum,
Who kept two black sheep in his room.
“They remind me,” he said,
“Of two friends who are dead.”
But he never would tell us of whom.
But its appeal would be mainly to grown-ups.
For a further study of the limerick I must refer to Langford Reed’s Complete
Limerick Book (1925), a useful guide to this particular English form of non­
sense verse which has delighted generation after generation.
As an example of Rudyard Kipling’s nonsense verses I choose the begin­
ning of “The Camel’s Hump” from his Just so Stories:
The Camel’s hump is an ugly lump
Which you may see at the Zoo;
But uglier yet is the hump we get
For having nothing to do.
Kiddies and grown-ups too-oo-oo,
If we haven’t enough to do-oo-oo,
We get the hump Camellious hump The hump that is black and blue!
Hilaire Belloc’s unsentimental nursery poems, Cautionary Tales for Children,
The Bad ChikVs Book o f Beasts, and More Beasts for Worse Children, etc.
(now all collected in Cautionary Verses, 1939), are a wonderful innovation of
the nonsense poetry of children (and grown-ups). I select among his Beasts
two, first “The Hippopotamus” :
I shoot the Hippopotamus
With bullets made of platinum,
Because if I use leaden ones
His hide is sure to flatten ’em,
and next, “The Bison” :
Nonsense in the Nursery
The Bison is vain, and (I write it with pain)
The Door-mat you see on his head
Is not, as some learned professors maintain,
The opulent growth of a genius’ brain;
But is sewn on with needle and thread.
G. K. Chesterton, whose essay A Defenee o f Nonsense has already been quoted
several times, has also a claim to be ranked as a true nonsense poet. Here is an
extract from “The Oneness of the Philosopher with Nature” :
I am the Tiger’s confidant,
And never mention names:
The Lion drops the formal “Sir” ,
And lets me call him James.
Into my ear the blushing Whale
Stammers his love. I know
Why the Rhinoceros is sad, Ah, child! ’twas long ago.
I am akin to all the Earth
By many a tribal sign:
The aged Pig will often wear
That sad, sweet smile of mine.
Together with Belloc and Chesterton should be mentioned the name of E.
Clerihew Bentley, from whose second name the word “a clerihew” has been
coined, denoting a form af verse which the poet has made his own. It consists
of a pair of rhymed, usually short couplets, more or less after the model of the
epigram on two well-known school mistresses:
Miss Buss and Miss Beale
Cupid’s darts do not feel:
Miss Beale and Miss Buss
Are not made like us.
E. C. Bentley’s Clerihews Complete (1951), with delightful illustrations by
G. K. Chesterton, is a most inspiring book of subtle nonsense, but most of
his clerihews are beyond the understanding of children. However, a few of the
easier ones may legitimately be included here. His “Biography for Beginners”
is introduced with the following clerihew:
Elias Bredsdorff
362
The Art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about Maps,
But Biography is about Chaps.
Four examples of Bentley’s talent for concentrating the essential facts about
famous historical persons in four short lines are given below:
Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I am going to dine with some men.
“If anybody calls
“Say I am designing St. Paul’s.”
The people of Spain think Cervantes
Equal to half-a-dozen Dantes:
An opinion resented most bitterly
By the people of Italy.
George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.
“Dear me,” exclaimed Homer,
“W hat a delicious aroma.
“It smells as if a town
“Was being burnt down.”
Harry Graham ’s Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes (1910) has now be­
come an English classic of cynical nursery verse. Here is the verse entitled
“The Stern Father” :
Father heard his children scream,
So he threw them in the stream,
Saying, as he drowned the third,
“Children should be seen, not heard!”
And one entitled “Aunt” :
Aunt, a most delightful soul
But with little self-control,
When run over by a “taxi”,
Grew unconscionably waxy.
Nonsense in the Nursery
She could not have made more fuss
Had it been a m otor-bus!
A. A. Milne, who is one of the best modern writers of prose nonsense for
children, has also a place among the nonsense poets. I shall quote two extracts
of his nonsense poems, first from “A Song for the Summer”, so full of gentle
consolation:
Is it ehilly ? After all,
We must not forget the Poodle,
If the days were really hot
Could he wear one woolly spot ?
Could he even keep his shawl ?
No, he’d shave the whole caboodle.
And one extract from Milne’s “Three Foxes” :
They didn’t go shopping in the High Street shopses,
But caught what they wanted in the woods and copses.
They all went fishing, and they caught three wormses,
They went out hunting, and they caught three wopses.
It would be possible to go on adding to the list by quoting examples of nonsense
poems by A. P. Herbert, Walter de la Mare, T. S. Eliot, Langford Reed and
others, but the list is long enough as it is.
In conclusion, however, two American humorists ought to mentioned who
have both contributed wise nonsense. One is Gelett Burgess who is renowned
for having written this little rhyme:
I never saw a purple cow,
I never hope to see one;
But I can teil you anyhow,
I’d rather see than be one.
The other is that excellent modern American poet of subtle Sense and Nonsense,
Ogden Nash, who may be represented here by his statement of the oldest
problem in the world:
Let’s think of eggs.
They have no legs.
Chickens come from eggs,
But they have legs.
The plot thickens:
363
Elias Bredsdorjj
364
Eggs come from chickens,
But have no legs under ’em W hat a conundrum !
“There are two ways of escaping the house of Common-sense - by breaking the
windows or upsetting the furniture, by the magic of Fairyland or by the
topsy-turvydom of Nonsense,” says Emile Cammaerts in The Poetry o f Non­
sense. Let us face it then and realise that nonsense poetry is escapism. But so is
chess, and other games. That is the very reason why it appeals so much to
children. It is a game, a literary game, for which the English have a special
aptitude and liking, as they have for cricket. It can be played crudely and
childishly, but, as we have seen, it can be played skilfully and with great
intelligence. And it is one of the most fascinating games in the world to watch.