Today’s Poem: Faithless Nelly Gray

One pun after another

John Augustus Atkinson, Lieutenant Colonel Macleod at Badajoz, after 1812 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Faithless Nelly Gray

by Thomas Hood

Ben Battle was a soldier bold,
And used to war’s alarms;
But a cannon-ball took off his legs,
So he laid down his arms.

Now as they bore him off the field,
Said he, ‘Let others shoot;
For here I leave my second leg,
And the Forty-second Foot.’

The army-surgeons made him limbs:
Said he, ‘They’re only pegs;
But there’s as wooden members quite,
As represent my legs.’

Now Ben he loved a pretty maid, —
Her name was Nelly Gray;
So he went to pay her his devours,
When he devoured his pay.

But when he called on Nelly Gray,
She made him quite a scoff;
And when she saw his wooden legs,
Began to take them off.

‘O Nelly Gray! O Nelly Gray!
Is this your love so warm?
The love that loves a scarlet coat
Should be more uniform.’

Said she, ‘I loved a soldier once,
For he was blithe and brave;
But I will never have a man
With both legs in the grave.’

‘Before you had those timber toes
Your love I did allow;
But then, you know, you stand upon
Another footing now.’

‘O Nelly Gray! O Nelly Gray!
For all your jeering speeches,
At duty’s call I left my legs
In Badajos’s breaches.’

‘Why, then,’ said she, ‘you’ve lost the feet
Of legs in war’s alarms,
And now you cannot wear your shoes
Upon your feats of arms!’

‘O false and fickle Nelly Gray!
I know why you refuse:
Though I’ve no feet, some other man
Is standing in my shoes.’

‘I wish I ne’er had seen your face;
But, now, a long farewell!
For you will be my death — alas!
You will not be my Nell!’

Now when he went from Nelly Gray
His heart so heavy got,
And life was such a burden grown,
It made him take a knot.

So round his melancholy neck
A rope he did intwine,
And, for his second time in life,
Enlisted in the Line.

One end he tied around a beam,
And then removed his pegs;
And, as his legs were off — of course
He soon was off his legs.

And there he hung till he was dead
As any nail in town;
For, though distress had cut him up,
It could not cut him down.

A dozen men sat on his corpse,
To find out why he died, — 
And they buried Ben in four cross-roads
With a stake in his inside.
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Thomas Hood (1799–1845) is a poet to whom Sally Thomas and I came with differing pictures. Born in the infancy of Romanticism, dying in the first decade of the reign of Queen Victoria, he had some 19th-century popularity — and Sally encountered him in her childhood anthologies as an occasional humorist whose best-known work was such sentimental stuff as “I Remember, I Remember” and such popular plaints, nearly as sentimental, about the sufferings of the working class as “The Song of the Shirt” and “The Bridge of Sighs.”

My own first encounters with Hood were with his comic poems. I vaguely knew of him as a sentimental writer, a presence in Victorian anthologies of parlor verse, but it was his fun, light verse that stayed in mind until we began working on Poems Ancient and Modern: such poems as “No!” (which we offered this fall) and Today’s Poem, “Faithless Nelly Gray.” (Not to forget his son, the humorist and friend of all, Tom Hood.)

Thomas Hood (Project Gutenberg)

One of our whimsical Wednesday offerings, Thomas Hood’s “Faithless Nelly Gray” is essentially word-play verse in a light ballad meter: four-foot line alternating with three-foot, rhymed just on the shorter lines.

So, for example, we get a play on two senses of arms: “But a cannon-ball took off his legs, / So he laid down his arms.” On foot as the end of the leg and as a troop of foot-soldiers: “I leave my second leg, / And the Forty-second Foot.” On uniform: “The love that loves a scarlet coat / Should be more uniform.” On footing: “you stand upon / Another footing now.”

My favorite is “I left my legs / In Badajos’s breaches,” playing on breeches as pants and breaches as breaks in the fortress walls during the 1812 Siege of Badajoz, Wellington’s bloodiest capture of a Spanish town. “Pay her his devours, / When he devoured his pay” relies on a mangling of the French word from which came the English expression “pay one’s devoirs,” meaning to visit to pay one’s formal respects to someone. Robert Smith Surtees in his 1838 Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities makes the same pun: “You must pay your devours, as we say in France, to the ’am, for it is an especial fine one, and do take a few eggs with it.”

There’s a kind of comedy that’s like a cascade — think of the 1980 movie Airplane! — where part of the comedy is the relentlessness of the jokes. Not all of them land, but before we have a chance to decide, the next joke is already popping out of the queue. And Hood’s “Faithless Nelly Gray” is very much in this line: one pun after another, where a good part of the joke is our seeing how long the author can keep the puns going.

A page from William Ralston’s illustrated edition of Hood’s “Faithless Nelly Gray” (Meisterdrucke)

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