Atlantic Unbound | Soundings

Click on the names below to hear these poets read "The Owl and the Pussy-cat" (requires RealPlayer):

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Previously in Soundings:

"Sir Walter Ralegh to His Son" (January 30, 2002)
Read aloud by Henri Cole, David Ferry, and Linda Gregerson. Introduction by Linda Gregerson.

Robert Lowell, "For the Union Dead" (April 11, 2001)
Read aloud by Frank Bidart, Peter Davison, and Robert Pinsky. Introduction by Peter Davison.

Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress" (February 26, 2001)
Read aloud by Linda Gregerson, J. D. McClatchy, and Heather McHugh. Introduction by Linda Gregerson.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "This Lime-tree Bower My Prison" (September 27, 2000)
Read aloud by Steven Cramer, Stanley Plumly, and Thomas Sleigh. Introduction by Steven Cramer.

Elizabeth Bishop, "Sonnet" (March 29, 2000)
Read aloud by Gail Mazur, Robert Pinsky, Lloyd Schwartz, and Mark Strand. Introduction by Lloyd Schwartz.

John Clare, "I Am" (December 8, 1999)
Read aloud by David Barber, Carolyn Kizer, and Christopher Ricks. Introduction by David Barber.

More Soundings in Atlantic Unbound.

More on poetry in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly.

Atlantic Unbound | May 30, 2002

Soundings

Edward Lear, 'The Owl and the Pussycat'

Introduction by Lloyd Schwartz

.....

rtists and people who love art have always worried the question of what possible usefulness art can have. In "Ode to a Nightingale," for example, Keats questions the value of art and poetry—of beauty itself—in a world full of suffering. In the next-to-last stanza, he presents his images of the two opposing but complementary "uses" of the Nightingale: consolation for what has already occurred—the tragedies of loss, loneliness, and homesickness—as the bird's song finds its path through the sad heart of Ruth; and a looking forward and outward—opening the windows of the imagination, those "charm'd magic casements," onto new, more dangerous, riskier (even if less tangible) worlds, "the foam of perilous seas in faerylands forlorn." By the end of the poem, it's not just the consoling but also the fantasy, the enchantment, that keep the poet alive in this vale of tears, this "vale of soul-making," as he called it in a now famous letter.

We can always use work that illuminates the tragedies we face, that helps us sort out the complexities of our lives. But if this is why we read poetry, we also mustn't forget that it was probably the enchantment, the charm and music, that made us turn to poetry in the first place. Not poems with an easy, cloying prettiness, the momentary distraction from serious matters, but works—like a Mozart serenade—that possess a beauty so fully achieved, so irresistible, that the very beauty creates its own unshakable permanence just as it gives us the illusion that it's about to evaporate into the air. At the heart of the matter is something literally akin to magic, the mysterious power—beyond analysis—of transforming the world of the reader into a kind of paradise. Spells can be cast only with the right ingredients in perfect proportion. That spell may be the true goal of the artist, while profound subject matter itself is no guarantee that a poem is going to "work," let alone last. Yet this "synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination," as Coleridge called it in his Biographia Literaria, and which "brings the whole soul of man into activity," may be even harder to master in the lighter modes, precisely because profound issues are almost by definition excluded—or at least thoroughly disguised.

Elsewhere on the Web:

"Edward Lear Homepage"
Selected songs, stories, and limericks by Edward Lear, along with examples of his illustrations, and essays about the poet. Among the many High-Serious literary figures of the Victorian era lurked a small number of poets who resisted the reigning solemnity: W. S. Gilbert, Thomas Hood, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear. As Lear himself did, we call their poems "nonsense." But inaccurately. Don't they incorporate, as in the proto-Freudian surrealism of Gilbert's "Nightmare Song" from Iolanthe ("When you're lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is taboo'd by anxiety"), an inner-logic (Lewis Carroll was, after all, a mathematician), however inverted or childlike, a dream narrative that provides a lyric alternative to more conventionally serious and "grown-up" thought processes? (In nineteenth-century America, the poets who provided that alternative were Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson.)

Gilbert was essentially a satirist; Carroll a parodist. In his limericks, Lear is more of a tease (isn't that part of the tickling frustration we feel when those limericks refuse to end with a punchline?). A friend aptly calls them "bagatelles." Gilbert's thinly veiled self-portrait in Princess Ida ("If you give me your attention, I will tell you what I am") takes bravura delight in his essential bitterness ("But although I try to make myself as pleasant as I can,/Yet everybody says I'm such a disagreeable man!"). Lear's ironical self-portraits, in his drawings as well as in his poems, reveal a more quietly comic and touchingly inward melancholia about his own mortality:

He weeps by the side of the ocean,
      He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
      And chocolate shrimps from the mill.

He reads but he cannot speak Spanish,
      He cannot abide ginger-beer:
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
      How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!

            ("How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear")

In Lear's best-loved poem, "The Owl and the Pussy-cat," the logic underlying the fantasy is an emotional trueness. This tender narrative of love and escape is filled both with anti-Victorian romantic risk, a sense of exotic (and, dare we say, erotic?) adventure, and also a piquant post-Romantic, post-Industrial-Revolution sense of practicality (these lovers even wrap their money in money). It's not satire. The mince and the quince, the colors (that pea-green boat!) and light, are too deliciously real to be the object of ridicule. We want to partake of this pleasure-feast.

The Owl and the Pussy-cat

                      1

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!'

The Owl and the Pussy-cat by Edward Lear

                      2

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.

                      3

'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.

If the most admired literary achievements of the Victorians are to be found primarily in prose ("Meredith was a prose Browning," Oscar Wilde quipped, "and so was Browning"), there was also a backlash against prosaic proprieties in the form of an overripe musicality—as in Tennyson's syrupy imitation of Keats in "The moan of doves in immemorial elms,/And murmuring of innumerable bees" or Swinburne's self-conscious alliterations and heavy-lidded, enervated rhythms as he exchanges "the lilies and languors of virtue/For the raptures and roses of vice." The comedians were actually among the poets with the most sensitive ears. And the most musical of all these poems (Stravinsky loved it and set it to music) is surely Lear's endearing masterpiece.

Music is crucial. Lear is explicit about its importance. The Owl is a proto-rock star, winning his way into the Pussy-cat's heart with the help of a "small guitar." More covertly, Lear keeps ringing surprising variations on his own delicately intricate musical pattern. His 11-line stanzas consist of twin ballad-quatrains, rhyming ABCB DEFE in alternating tetrameters and trimeters mixing iambic (_ /) and anapestic (_ _ /) feet, followed by three short lines, and a little verse "tail" (not inappropriate for a poem whose heroine is a pussy-cat). But there's a formal ambiguity. The last line of the double quatrain reappears—complete—at the very end of the stanza, and these two identical lines surround two even shorter identical (monometer) lines. So the last line of the double quatrain also serves as the first line of a third quatrain, all four of whose lines end with the same word.

These overlapping quatrains ingeniously unify the unusual stanza length and expand the efficient clip of the traditional four-line ballad stanza into a more leisurely and copious vehicle. In eleven lines, there are only five different rhymes (in the first stanza, there are arguably only four). And each line without an end-rhyme makes up for this absence with a chiming internal rhyme ("They took some honey, and plenty of money"; "Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl!"; "O let us be married! too long we have tarried," etc.) Lear further connects the stanzas by having one of these internally rhyming lines ("They sailed away, for a year and a day") rhyme with another ("So they took it away, and were married next day"), across stanzas. He saves until the beginning of the very last stanza his one climactic moment of enjambment—heightening the excitement by rushing without pause from the end of one line into the beginning of the next:

'Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?'

The most musical gesture of all is the unexpected appearance of those two identical short lines:

What a beautiful Pussy you are,
      You are,
      You are! . . .

With a ring at the end of his nose,
      His nose,
      His nose . . .

They danced by the light of the moon,
      The moon,
      The moon . . .

These veritably trance-like refrains create an atmosphere of mystery and awe that is the deepest quality of this poem. Aren't these facts remarkable! Who could believe them? Yet who couldn't believe them? "You are,/You are!" the Owl insists, perhaps pre-empting his extraordinary lover's possible protestations of modesty. "His nose,/His nose" has an air of amused disbelief (Imagine! Have you ever seen such a thing?). And "The moon,/The moon"—as uncannily poignant as Frost's repetition of "And miles to go before I sleep"—combines a sense of ecstatic revelation with the acceptance of a kind of simple blessing. Lear leaves his two honeymooners bathed in heavenly light, dancing. Reading these lines aloud, which they cry out for, we should be sure we give them their full weight and expansiveness.

Click on the names below to hear these poets read
"The Owl and the Pussy-cat" (in RealAudio):

(For help, see a note about the audio.)

Gail Mazur's most recent collection of poems, They Can't Take That Away From Me, was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. Her previous books include The Common and The Pose of Happiness. She is the founder of the Blacksmith House Reading Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and currently teaches at Emerson College.

Lloyd Schwartz is the director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts Boston, the classical-music editor of The Boston Phoenix, and a regular commentator on NPR's Fresh Air. His most recent collection of poems is Cairo Traffic (University of Chicago Press. He is co-editor, with Robert Giroux, of the forthcoming Library of America volume Elizabeth Bishop: Collected Poetry and Prose. In 1994 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Richard Wilbur is former poet laureate of the United States and the author of numerous works of poetry and translation. His most recent books are Mayflies, a collection of poems and translations, and a verse translation of Molière's Don Juan: A Comedy in Five Acts. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for his New and Collected Poems.