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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
I am in my thirties. My second thirties.
The non-nonsense curmudgeon, Samuel Johnson, kicked a stone and said something like “Thus I refute you, sir.”
An old P.I. at his desk
Was planning his day for the best
When a limerick thread started
His mindset departed
And his whole day’s schedule went out the window.
Principle Investigator? (That’s what P.I. meant at the place where I worked. You had to specify the P.I. on research grant proposals.)
Imagine being from Nantucket. The ribbing you would have to take …
Private. As in “Magnum,” except I don’t get the girl at the end. Or “Rockford,” although I usually do get paid, and I don’t live in a trailer.
Manny don’t listen to her, I have met The Fabulous She and she could easily pass for early 50’s.
Thanks. (I think . . . )
Ah. Well, now I can quit trying to figure out the math aspect.
Didn’t, though.
Finally, someone who is ready to rumble.
Sounds like someone needs a penname upgrade.
Well, it’s theoretically possible.
Back in the day, we would end up in Papa John’s after most football games with at least three sousaphone players at the table. Gary (different, as yet unreferenced Gary) would invariably order “a pitcher of dark”, which of course he would not get because we were all underage.
There’s a singer out there named “Her.” I think she was nominated for a Grammy this year. Don’t know if
sheHer won.Or Madras.
The first line can start out quite mild.
The second might start to get wild.
The next two are short.
To set up the sport
In the fifth where it’s often defiled.
I remember way (,way) back when the public school system still pretended to teach stuff, that one assignment was to write a limerick. I dashed off something that started with ‘There once was a pie made of dirt’ and ended with ‘but if eaten your stomach twould hurt’ and for the life of me I cannot remember what came in between. It was less than 60 years ago, too. Probably. By at least a year, Surely?
Reminds me of my grandmother who used to say, “you’ve got to eat a peck of dirt before you die.”
I used to wonder if she meant that, if I added it up throughout my life, by the time I reached the end of it I’d have eaten a peck of dirt; or if she meant that if I sat down and started to munch my way through a wheelbarrow full of it, when I’d eaten a peck, I’d keel over. I suspect the former, but it was nicely ambiguous.