Oh,milk pan thank you for the joy
When I  sip my  Horlicks  here.
You have never set on fire
Nor exploded  in your ire
For I burned you by mistake
When I wrote a poem one  night
Yet when I have cleaned you up
No-one would  guess there was mishap
Unlike the dangerous non-stick pans
I have destroyed eight or nine
For I have to harm some  thing
Since my husband went missing
Better far to break a plate
Than to fall into a lake
Without conscious plan or thought
I broke all  those mugs he bought
And I broke the wedding gifts
Eight green bowls and sugar sieves
Still I have not burned a cake
Though my hands do rather ache
My joints are swollen like my head
I think I’d  better go to bed
Otherwise I might  confess
That  last night I wore a dress
A summer navy with white stripes
On my body of delight
So  now I’ve told you  of my sin
I hope you will not tell my kin
For they think I am a  saint
My reputation  has no taint
But in secret I am bad,
When a girl I loved a lad
Now I’m older I still do
To be honest,I love two.
One is from  the North York Moors
The other’s foreign,I am sure
For unlike  cold English folk
I’m his cat and he  me strokes
He cannot speak except in code
I understand it’s  very rude.
Since he’s   only 93
I hope that he will outlast me
As for that braw Yorkish man
I’ll get another woman in
Then we’ll live like animals
As a  little group of pals.
We’ll pray for mercy as we’re old
We want fun  before we’re cold

The Northern lights

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/12/hopeful-images-from-2017/547931/

  A year of shock , a year of awe
We will look and say a prayer
So small amid this world of light
Let  our sorrow shape our heart
Then we will with wider view
See all things are made anew
Nothing lives without our care
Love and Mercy shall dwell here
Digest the  painful  and the good
Respect the heart and shed no  blood
In the end we all shall die
Kiss the moment as it flies

A philosopher who spoke well in Greek
Said Latin is not up my street.
So  she bought a new map
Which she glued to her lap
Tantrum ergo, her Latin now speaks.

Her view of topology was bleak
As her hatred of rubber was leaked
So  she bought a rubber mattress
And roamed the street mapless.
For she wanted a goose  that could speak

Her duvet was  filled with fake down
As were her nightdress and gown
So she kept herself healthy
Upbraiding the wealthy
And washing her verbs with her nouns.

She had books in the wardrobe and bath
Which filled  bother  her sisters with wrath
So she cut off her hair
And married the chair
We all   suffered from  a good laugh

Van Gogh and Picasso hung near
And ,How to make love without fear.
Otherwise it was Goethe
Who had never hurt her
As she fantasied him drinking beer.

Impressionism  made  this lady feel good
The tulips were made of fake wood
The poppies were many
But she didn’t pick any
Though under the impression she could

Nonsense Poetry

 

Extract

Solomon Grundy,
Born on Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday,
And that was the end of Solomon Grundy.

which is a gloomy story, but remarkably similar to yours or mine.

Until Surrealism made a deliberate raid on the unconscious, poetry that aimed at being nonsense, apart from the meaningless refrains of songs, does not seem to have been common. This gives a special position to Edward Lear, whose nonsense rhymes have just been edited by Mr R. L. Megroz[1], who was also responsible for the Penguin edition a year or two before the war. Lear was one of the first writers to deal in pure fantasy, with imaginary countries and made-up words, without any satirical purposes. His poems are not all of them equally nonsensical; some of them get their effect by a perversion of logic, but they are all alike in that their underlying feeling is sad and not bitter. They express a kind of amiable lunacy, a natural sympathy with whatever is weak and absurd. Lear could fairly be called the originator of the limerick, though verses in almost the same metrical form are to be found in earlier writers, and what is sometimes considered a weakness in his limericks — that is, the fact that the rhyme is the same in the first and last lines — is part of their charm. The very slight change increases the impression of ineffectuality, which might be spoiled if there were some striking surprise. For example:

There was a young lady of Portugal
Whose ideas were excessively nautical;
She climbed up a tree
To examine the sea,
But declared she would never leave Portugal.

It is significant that almost no limericks since Lear’s have been both printable and funny enough to seem worth quoting. But he is really seen at his best in certain longer poems, such as ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ or ‘The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’:

On the Coast of Coromandel,
Where the early pumpkins blow,
In the middle of the woods
Lived the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.
Two old chairs, and half a candle
One old jug without a handle
These were all his worldly goods:
In the middle of the woods,
These were all the worldly goods
Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò,
Of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

Later there appears a lady with some white Dorking hens, and an inconclusive love affair follows. Mr Megroz thinks, plausibly enough, that this may refer to some incident in Lear’s own life. He never married, and it is easy to guess that there was something seriously wrong in his sex life. A psychiatrist could no doubt find all kinds of significance in his drawings and in the recurrence of certain made-up words such as “runcible”. His health was bad, and as he was the youngest of twenty-one children in a poor family, he must have known anxiety and hardship in very early life. It is clear that he was unhappy and by nature solitary, in spite of having good friends.

Aldous Huxley, in praising Lear’s fantasies as a sort of assertion of freedom, has pointed out that the ‘They’ of the limericks represent common sense, legality and the duller virtues generally. ‘They’ are the realists, the practical men, the sober citizens in bowler hats who are always anxious to stop you doing anything worth doing. For instance:

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.

To smash somebody just for dancing a quadrille with a raven is exactly the kind of thing that ‘They’ would do. Herbert Read has also praised Lear, and is inclined to prefer his verse to that of Lewis Carroll, as being purer fantasy. For myself, I must say that I find Lear funniest when he is least arbitrary and when a touch of burlesque or perverted logic makes its appearance. When he gives his fancy free play, as in his imaginary names, or in things like ‘Three Receipts for Domestic Cookery’, he can be silly and tiresome. ‘The Pobble Who Has No Toes’ is haunted by the ghost of logic, and I think it is the element of sense in it that makes it funny. The Pobble, it may be remembered, went fishing in the Bristol Channel:

He told me he loved me before the tide over-took us
His hands seem to twitch all over me and he trembled with tears of mirth
He was the most underrated blogger of his entire degeneration
His words felt like raindrops on toast.
His talent was unmarketable Round his genius a sorrow in the dark
His eyes gleamed like traffic signals stuck on ” no go”
His writing was hard to put down
He never told me his time frame but I watched him covertly on my swatch
He told me I was named in his bills.I had overspent his money.He divorced me and I over responded by shooting him with my bow and arrow.All things may go round the bend