Today’s Poem: The Owl and the Pussycat

Edward Lear and the sublimity of nonsense

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat by Edward Lear, 1871 (Wikimedia Commons)

Edward Lear (1812–1888) was one of those polymathic oddities whose tribe flourished in the Victorian era. He was an ornithological illustrator, a landscape painter, a travel writer, a musician and composer. The youngest survivor of a family of twenty-one children, he was doted on as the household baby by a much-older sister until her death, when Lear was nearly fifty. He was an epileptic, a depressive, and a lonely man, whose chief companion toward the end of his life was his cat, Foss.