Updating the Goose

I’ve used this cartoon on the Treasury of Laughter before, of course. But it fits in so well with the next little bit, well, I just can’t resist.

Revamping those old Mother Goose tales, of course, is an old saw of the creative writer. Why, here’s Walter de la Mare telling us all about Jack and Jill:

Up to the top of the haunted turf

They climbed on moonlit hill;

Not a leaf rustled in the underbrush,

The listening air was still.

And only the noise of the water pail

As it struck on a jutting stone,

Clattered and jarred against the silence

As the two trod on alone.

Up to the moonlit peak they went;

And, though not a word would they say,

Their thoughts outnumbered a poet’s love-songs

In the first green weeks of May.

The stealthy shadows crept closer;

They clutched at the hem of Jill’s gown;

And there at the very top she stumbled,

And Jack came shuddering down.

Their cries rang out against the stillness,

Pitiful and high and thin.

And the echoes edged back still further

As the silence gathered them in.

There, typical pap and – whoah.

Yikes. Yeah, I guess, if you parse the words and read it without a sing-song voice, the original rhyme to jack and Jill is pretty macabre. Seeing it in this situation, of course, twists the situation enough to make the eerie situation of the original peek out of the simple, familiar words.

Makepeace. How Ironic.

So, where’s the fun in a novel that involves unrequited love, a pistol sabotaged with chicken blood, and a hero who sheds his passion and becomes a respectable citizen?

Well, if you’re talking about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” the fun is in William Makepeace Thackeray’s satirical treatment of the novel in the sixteen-lined poem “Sorrows of Werther.”

Here’s the poem, in full:

Werther had a love for Charlotte

Such as words could never utter;

Would you know how first he met her?

She was cutting bread and butter.

Charlotte was a married lady,

And a moral man was Werther,

And for all the wealth of Indies

Would do nothing for to hurt her.

So he sigh’d and pin’d and ogled,

And his passion boil’d and bubbled,

Till he blew his silly brains out,

And no more was by it troubled.

Charlotte, having seen his body

Borne before her on a shutter,

Like a well-conducted person,

Went on cutting bread and butter.

Thackeray makes a wonderful mockery of the heavy Sturm und Drang vibe of Goethe’s novel, boiling down Werther’s gleeful angst into a handful of wonderful English contracted nouns that kind of poke a pin into the dreary world that is youthful agony.

That’s the gift of the poet, and probably one of the reasons Robert Newton Peck urges serious fiction writers to write a poem a day, just to get into the habit of really playing with language in a narrow, harrowing kind of way.

Lear, Lear, the Gang's All Here

I have, apparently, missed something, never having heard Edward Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat” as a child. My evidence? Everyone else in the universe, it seems, has recorded themselves reciting, reading, or singing this poem and posted the results on YouTube. Listen.

First, the poem as done by a Serious Poet, in a Serious Poet Voice;

Next, a rather bland animation of the poem done by someone whom, it appears, really had no idea:

Then there’s this happily singing fellow. I think this is the one I enjoy the most. He’s enjoying himself at least, not taking himself too seriously.

No one, oddly, has seen fit to record and then post themselves giving the same treatment to Lear’s Incidents in the Life of My Uncle Arly which, in my mind, ranks a bit higher on the nonsense poetry scale than the aforementioned Owl and Pussycat:

O! My aged Uncle Arly!
Sitting on a heap of Barley
      Thro' the silent hours of night,--
Close beside a leafy thicket:--
On his nose there was a Cricket,--
In his hat a Railway-Ticket;--
      (But his shoes were far too tight.)
Long ago, in youth, he squander'd
All his goods away, and wander'd
      To the Tiniskoop-hills afar.
There on golden sunsets blazing,
Every morning found him gazing,--
Singing -- "Orb! you're quite amazing!
      How I wonder what you are!"
Like the ancient Medes and Persians,
Always by his own exertions
      He subsisted on those hills;--
Whiles, -- by teaching children spelling,--
Or at times by merely yelling,--
Or at intervals by selling
      "Propter's Nicodemus Pills."
Later, in his morning rambles
He perceived the moving brambles--
      Something square and white disclose;--
"Twas a First-class Railway Ticket;
But, on stooping down to pick it
Off the ground, -- a pea-green Cricket
      settled on my uncle's Nose.
Never -- never more, -- Oh! never,
Did that Cricket leave him ever,--
      Dawn or evening, day or night;--
Clinging as a constant treasure,--
Chirping with a cheerious measure,--
Wholly to my uncle's pleasure
      (Though his shoes were far too tight.)
So for three-and-forty winters,
Till his shoes were worn to splinters,
      All those hills he wander'd o'er,--
Sometimes silent; -- sometimes yelling;--
Till he came to Borley-Melling,
Near his old ancestral dwelling;--
      (But his shoes were far too tight.)
On a little heap of Barley
Died my aged uncle Arly,
      And they buried him one night;--
Close beside the leafy thicket;--
There, -- his hat and Railway-Ticket;--
There, -- his ever-faithful Cricket;--
      (But his shoes were far too tight.) 

Lear, of course, is probably best known as the modern popularizer of the limerick, viz:

There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, “It is just as I feared!
To Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard.”

In fact, Lear is probably only second to this anonymous, yet much more familiar (at least to my ears) limerick popularizer:

Oh yeah. Good times.