By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’ is one of the greatest nonsense poems by the Victorian poet and artist Edward Lear (1812-88). Among other things, Lear is known for popularising the limerick among Victorian readers, and for being, along with Lewis Carroll, probably the chief exponent of nonsense verse in English. (We have gathered together our pick of the best nonsense poems in a separate post.)
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Although he’s well-known as a pioneer of the poetic form known as the limerick, Edward Lear (1812-88) wrote a number of other classic poems which are among the finest examples of ‘nonsense verse’. Here are five of Edward Lear’s best poems, along with some information about each of them.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ is probably Edward Lear’s most famous poem, and a fine example of Victorian nonsense verse. But can one really analyse nonsense literature, or subject it to critical scrutiny? After all, the very name implies that it’s not supposed to make ‘sense’. Yet whenever a poem attains iconic status, it’s worth discussing how it has earned that status.
Edward Lear’s sequel to his classic nonsense love poem
Did you know that Edward Lear wrote a sequel to ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’? ‘The Children of the Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ first appeared in Angus Davidson’s Edward Lear: Landscape Painter and Nonsense Poet in 1938. It makes it clear that the cat was indeed the female in this unlikely marriage, and the owl male. It also takes a rather tragic turn, as the Owl and Pussy-Cat’s offspring tell us of the death of their feline mother some five years earlier, and the resulting single-parent upbringing they had. The poem was never finished, and Lear never published it, but it helps to underscore the sense of melancholy and sadness that pervades Lear’s best-loved nonsense verse – as well as Lear’s own life.
‘The Children of the Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ is reproduced below, complete with the gaps in the original manuscript – just as Lear, sadly, left it.
Our mother was the Pussy-cat, our father was the Owl,
And so we’re partly little beasts and partly little fowl,
The brothers of our family have feathers and they hoot,
While all the sisters dress in fur and have long tails to boot.
Interesting Edward Lear facts: concerning his life and his contribution to nonsense literature
1. He helped to popularise the limerick. Although he did not invent the form, the five-line comic verse known as the limerick (though nobody is quite sure why) in effect came of age with Edward Lear’s popular series of poems published in 1846 as the Book of Nonsense. We composed our own limericks (about Victorian writers) in this post.