Significant Edward Lear poems discovered
 

Hooray!

(Hope I'm posting in the right place.)

The lost limerick is pretty bad, though. Let's hope the other poem is more like the Jumblies than the limericks.

Roger, I quite like the limerick, especially for the dramatic ending! I do love the Jumblies, though.

There's a lot more information about the discovery here <(:-)

Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live -

what a haunting, mysterious opening that is!
And apparently quite unrelated to what follows, which of course reads:

Their heads are green and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve, they did,
They went to sea in a sieve.

Perhaps that mystery will never be solved!


Regards,
John

I think I've posted this video before, but I can't help myself; I love it!

I don't know, John. It kind of makes sense to me. The lands are mysterious; the Jumblies are mysterious. Mysterious and magical <(:-)

Best wishes,
Fliss

John, that's not actually the opening. It's the four lines that conclude each section. The opening of the poem begins:

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!

Fliss, thank you for the link to that splendid animation. I know that voice, though I can't place it, rather like the poem itself. I do hope kids get to hear Edward Lear these days! My favorite bits are the wild shopping spree when they arrive and "How wise we are!", but Roger, you also remind me - thank you! - both that I've not cracked open my biggish Lear volume in far too long, and that Lear loses a little of his superb vision, in my opinion, by telling us repeatedly about the sieve before we get to that splendid "Far and few..." On the other hand, I think that choice bothers practically nobody, so he was probably right. To me, it's all there in that crystalline moment of the refrain, unlike The Owl and the Pussycat, which never flags and which I think is better known for that reason. His two greatest poems, for my money, though he did invent the limerick and that is no mean feat.

Cheers,
John

As a kid reading limericks, I learned to skip the Edward Lear ones - they were usually pretty boring, and they lacked the twist endings that made limericks funny. All due respect to him for pioneering the form, but his most enjoyable poems aren’t his limericks. On the other hand, I was delighted to discover “The Jumblies” last year (I know, shocking that I hadn’t read it till then), as well as “The Dong with the Luminous Nose” and his other nonsense verse. I memorized The Jumblies, and my then 5- and 6-year-olds could recite most of it along with me. So, yes, Roger, I hope the other poem is less like the lost limerick, but to be completely honest, I hope it’s not much like ANY of his limericks (although maybe they’ve improved since I was a judgmental 10-year-old).

All the best,
Coleman

I think the main thing is to invent the form, which works perfectly in English. Lear's main problem in limerick-writing - to the extent I can say that about the guy who invented them - is that his vision involved repeating the first line at the end, which kind of kills the onward thrust and misses some golden opportunities. Thus, more or less:

There was an old man with a beard
Who said: It is just as I feared!
Two owls and a wren
A lark and a hen
Have all made their nests in my beard.

That closing beard kind of thuds. Tweaking the form to allow a new rhyme was IMO brilliant.

There is at least one limerick in French:

Il etait un jeune homme de Dijon
Qui n'avait que peu de religion
Il dit: Quant a moi
Je deteste les trois
Le pere, et le fils, et le pigeon.

Cute, but you have to explain it after reciting it to anyone French. The form is not intuitive.

Update: just to say the Blues similarly took a turn when someone thought to vary the repetend and rhyme it instead of repeating the entire line. Dylan for instance does this constantly, but you certainly see it in the Chicago Blues. Here's Dylan:

I ride on the mail train baby, can't buy a thrill;
I've been up all night, leaning on your windowsill, and so forth.


Cheers,
John

The Washington Post Style Invitational (weekly humor contest) once had a contest in which you were to take the first two lines of a Lear limerick and then finish the limerick on your own. It was presumably based on the widely-held view that Lear didn't finish his own limericks very well. It was a lot of fun writing limericks that way, something you might want to try yourself.

I was about to post an example but then I realized that posting one's own work is verboten here in General Announcements. I'll start a thread in D&A.