Today’s Poem: The Owl and the Pussycat
Edward Lear and the sublimity of nonsense
I
The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
“O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!”
II
Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?”
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-Tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.
III
“Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.”
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and 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,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
═══════════════════════(In the early months of Poems Ancient and Modern, we presented to our relatively small initial audience several poems that seem worth reviving for the larger number of readers the newsletter has now. And so, over the past few weeks, we have revisited a few of those poems from our archive — and now add “The Owl and the Pussycat,” in celebration of the birthday of Edward Lear today, May 12.)
Edward Lear (1812–1888) was one of those polymaths 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.
But we know him best for his nonsense verse. Today’s poem, “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat,” written for the three-year-old daughter of Lear’s friend, the poet John Addington Symonds, first appeared in 1870, in the American magazine Our Young Folks. Lear subsequently included the poem in his 1871 collection, Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets.
“The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” features one of Lear’s most famous nonsense-word coinages: the “runcible” spoon of the last stanza. Only Lear’s drawings of this object offer us a clue to what a runcible spoon might look like: a sort of cross between a soup spoon and a salad server. Given how long the handle was, possibly the newly-married couple were meant to feed each other the “mince and slices of quince” that comprised their wedding feast.
At any rate, with its giddy internal rhymes, the anapestic lilt of its common-measure stanzas, and the comic rapture generated by the dimeter repetitions that conclude each movement of the poem, “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” is a particular pleasure to read aloud, and an example of that thing poetry does when it doesn’t do anything else: to delight in language and the music to be made with it.
I used to think that an owl and a cat would be ill-suited to one another as a couple: that that was the point of the coupling in the poem, a nonsensical juxtaposition of opposites. But now I wonder if the reverse isn't true, and they're well matched, actually. After all they're both predators, both nocturnal, both renowned for their excellent night vision. You may know that Lear started writing, but never finished, a sequel poem to this one: "The Children of the Owl and the Pussy-cat" (it was posthumously published in 1938). That poem is spoken by the half-feline, half-owlish children of the couple. We learn that the owl and the pussycat sailed their boat to Calabria, on the toe of Italy, and there settled: that the cat died soon after, but that the owl "still preserves his voice, and when he sees a star/He often sings ------------ to that original guitar." https://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/pw/cop.html
Another childhood favorite! I absolutely love this poem and still have the book -- falling apart though it is -- from which my brother and I learned it some seven decades ago. I'll have to pull that book out today and revisit it.