Sunday, June 4, 2000		Article

Well-versed with nonsense
By Amrit Pal Tiwana

"A LITTLE nonsense now and then, is relished by the best of men," so goes a saying. And who does not at one time or another, feel obliged towards those creators of mirth whom we usually call by the name of "poetasters". There are many nonsense poems that should rather be called "cutting the lines of nonsense prose into equal length and then somehow or the other, finding a word to rhyme with the above line." But they surely work like an invigorating pepper in the monotonous and stressful life of today.

Let us first of all look at this anonymous poem that makes us laugh with its very repetition of words.

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
A peck of pickled peppers did Peter piper, pick
If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where is the peck of pickled peppers that pickled ,
Peter Piper picked?

Another delightful poem of this sort that was composed in 1641, has come down the ages due to its sheer clown-like imagination. It is as follows,

"If all the world were paper
And all the sea were ink,
And all the trees were bread and cheese,
What should we do for drink?"

Could not the poet rise above the level of bread and cheese, when his imagination’s wings could have imparted to him the ability to conjure up the realms of far-off stars and empyrean heights? The poet, even with the wings of poetic imagination at his disposal, prefers to tread upon the mundane plane of bread and cheese only. But this gives us relief to think that we are better placed having an ocean of water instead of that of ink.

Hardy depicted the great ironies of life. The tremendous tragedies in the lives of his characters compelled them to think that life was bitter. When Tess is going away after an extremely unhappy separation from her dearest one, the novelist writes.

"God is not in His heaven
And all is wrong with world."

But let us now have a look at a very funny concept of the "bitterness" of life. Lewis Carrol has written in The Gardener’s song,

"He thought he saw an elephant,
That practised on the fife,
He looked again and found it was
A letter from his wife"
"At length I realise" he said,
"the bitterness of life."

Jullian Street and J.M. Flagg wrote Read And Roe and it is replete with the repetition of the two names. The poet is interested in just making it rhyme, without bothering in the least whether it makes any sense or not. Here is a stanza,

"Said O.P. Read to E.P. Roe,
"How do you like Gaboiau?
"I like him very much indeed"
said E.P. Roe to O.P. Read."

Some poems, with their ridiculous incongruity and ill-alliance of imagery, provoke laughter. Just imagine a round-eyed owl and a pussycat dancing together, as if they were a young man and a young woman on a date. Here is a small example,

"The owl and the pussy cat went to sea,
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They dined on mince with slices of quince
Which they ate with a runcible spoon,
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon."

Did you notice that the lady is double the size of her escort? Well, it may be an incongruous and nonsense poem, but it just takes us away from the prosaic world of men and women, transporting us miraculously into a domain inhabited by sweet, quaint talking animals. It brings to us great entertainment and relief by dint of its sheer absurdity.

Reading serious and mentally taxing near trial all the time could make us sad. Most of us require some comic relief, too. Seriousness, sobriety and sublimity, without the relieving contrast of nonsense which can make us burst into guffaws of laughter at its absurdity, can also make our souls dull and drab and devoid of the drive to dance with abandon. Isn’t this slightly nonsense way of putting it a little delightful, too?

A smile for the road! Here are a few lines by Phoebe Cary,
"Sally Satter, she was a young teacher who taught,
And her friend, Charley Church, was a preacher
who praught,
Though his enemies called him a screecher
who scraught."