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Quote of the Day: How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear!
He has many friends, lay men and clerical,
Old Foss is the name of his cat;
His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat.
One of the dearest friends of my childhood, Edward Lear, passed away 132 years ago today, on January 29, 1888. Perhaps it’s because of him that I formed the love affair with words I’ve enjoyed for almost every single one of my sixty-five years. (I told you to believe people who tell you that I’m an old hag. Even if everything else they say about me is Learworthy nonsense.) Perhaps it was through Edward Lear that I found my voice. My sense of humor. My love of nature. And my foundational belief that truth, decency, and kindness are the most important values with which we should treat each other, and which we should pass on to future generations.
Edward Lear is best known as the man who popularized the limerick, although Lear’s limericks were nothing like the bawdy, double-entendre efforts that the genre has come to be known for more recently. (“A pansy who lived in Khartoum,” etc.) Lear’s limericks appealed to the sweet, the kind, and the gentle, and were always contra the ugly “they” who sometimes appeared to wreck his lovely world. Thus:
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, “It is just as I feared!—
Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!”
And
There was an Old Person of Dean,
Who dined on one pea and one bean;
For he said, “More than that would make me too fat,”
That cautious Old Person of Dean.
And
There was an Old Man of Whitehaven,
Who danced a quadrille with a Raven;
But they said, “It’s absurd to encourage this bird!”
So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.
It was a very long time before I discovered that Edward Lear was about far more than nonsense. More than Owls and Pussycats. More than The Jumblies (who “went to sea in a sieve”).
So much more.
He was a genius. An illustrator of birds on a par with John James Audubon. A landscape painter, and a travel writer matching and, perhaps, surpassing the magnificence of (deep breath) Paddy Leigh Fermor, who had his own private collection of Lear’s writings and paintings. A musician who set to music a number of Tennyson’s works–the only one such who Tennyson found remotely supportable.
And a terribly insecure, unhappy and sad man who suffered from grand-mal epileptic seizures all his life, who found his own sexual appetites and preferences problematic, whose only forays into heterosexual commitment were two proposals to the same woman who was 49 years younger than himself (crimenutely), and whose closest friends were his cat, Fosse, and his Albanian chef Giorgis, who Lear claimed was a good friend but a terrible cook. (The fact that he stuck with him, under those circumstances, says something about the man, I think.)
For anyone interested in learning more about Edward Lear, the book Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense, by Jenny Uglow, has my highest recommendation.
Edward Lear was buried in the Cimitero Monumentale della Foce in San Remo, Liguria, Italy, following a ceremony in which none of his family was present. On his grave marker are written Tennyson’s words:
…all things fair.
With such a pencil, such a pen.
You shadow’d forth to distant men,
I read and felt that I was there.
Thanks for everything, Edward Lear. I’m sorry I wasn’t around in the mid-19th century. If I had been, I’d have tried to be there for you. Because, God knows, you’ve always been there for me. And I’m grateful.
Oh, and PS, Ricochet. If you want to turn this into a limerick thread (because we haven’t had one for a while), I’m totally OK with that. And I suspect that EL would have been, too.
Published in General
A silly old poet named Lear
Claimed he had nothing to fear.
‘Till he took to his bed and promptly dropped dead,
Thus ending the Lear we revere.
There was a young man of Devizes
Whose ears were of different sizes.
The one was so small it was no ear at all
But the other won several prizes.
(Those aren’t quite the original words. Use your imagination.)
This one might make the CofC people a bit nervous.
There once was a hermit from Belgrave,
Who kept a dead prostitute in his cave.
Said he, “I’ll admit,”
I’m a bit of a twit,
But think of the money I save.
It was instructive, Kent. I wasn’t trying at all.
There was an old prof name of Kent
Who tried every post to be sent,
Promoted to the Main Feed,
And Ricochet agreed,
But Bob was the boy we all meant.
Ha ha. Good one, Arafat.
Is that the best reply you’ve got?
You expect too much from me. I can’t keep up.
Ah, I wish I knew what happened to my old friend Burns. He was always up for a limerick duel.
YOUR GRANDFATHER PLAYED IN JOHN PHILIP SOUSA’S BAND??!! That is totally awesome! I have a soft spot for him because he was the original marching band master! I was a Band Mom for twelve years straight when my children were attending school. We were living in Maryland, near Washington D.C. when our youngest was the musician, and he got to participate in Tuba Christmas at the Kennedy Center, where the first chair tuba players were all from the Marine Band! This son was also given the John Philip Sousa Award at his senior year awards ceremony by his band director. It recognizes “superior musicianship, dependability, loyalty, and cooperation.” He totally earned it.
This is a departure from the theme of limericks, I know. But Sousa is a big deal in our family and I’m delighted to know someone whose family has an even closer connection to the March King.
There once was a man with a horn,
Using skills with which he was born.
He wrote marches galore
That band leaders adore
And to whom tuba fans’ fealty is sworn.
Clean limericks! I had to go back to my High School years to find one.
His sister, named Lucy O’Finner
Grew constantly thinner and thinner
The reason was plain–
She slept out in the rain
And was never allowed any dinner. Lewis Carroll
………….
Wow, it’s great to see another band family! Mac (Ernest McMaster) played the baritone and the Sousaphone, and Sousa wrote a solo for him! After the band, he played in the Houston Symphony. He was a character. He hated all politicians, especially FDR. Here he is:
The CoC made me do it.
There once was a man from O’Neal
Who said “”Although pain isn’t real,
When I sit on a pin
That punctures my skin
I dislike what I fancy I feel.”
Lady Maude Hoare was married to Viscount Hoare, not a happy marriage apparently. Hope this makes it past the censor!
‘Enough’cried Lady Maude Hoare,
‘We’re not doing that any more.
You’re covered in sweat,
I haven’t come yet
And look at the time, half past four!’
Hahaha! I did not picture you as sixty-five. I would have guessed thirties.
When my step-daughter Helen Marie (known to family and friends as “HM”) married her husband, Jim, their wedding invitation read as follows:
There once was a fellow named Jim
Who fell for a girl called HM.
To wed they decided
and you are invited
to join in the general mayhem.
I’m also rather proud of a limerick I wrote for another step daughter, who excels at almost anything she puts her hand to. At the time she was living in a bohemian 3-room cottage on the outskirts of Durham, NC, writing articles for a small local paper and studying computer programming at the community college.
There once was a Rennaissance woman
Who lived in a cottage in Durham.
She could write, she could code,
She could dress a la mode.
All ’round she was right up-an-comin’.
Should be “That would whizz and then zing”.
Rhyming.
Nope. Don’t you know how to pronounce “thing,” Yankee?
These limerick threads bring out the best and the worst in Arahant.
JM, I think you were set up.
😁
You don’t look black.
Have you looked at my avatar lately?
My Maternal Grandfather looked similar. After a brief 1.5 years on the trumpet, I changed to baritone. Like @percival, I marched with it and a Sousaphone at the University of Illinois.
Two Sousaphone players walk past a bar ….
Hey, it could happen.
This, for all those who believe there is no such thing as an objective reality.