Nonsense Songs
and Stories

The Songs

Alphabetical list of the songs

Lear published two collections of songs and stories, quite different in style from the limericks books:

1. Nonsense Songs, Stories Botany and Alphabets, 1871
2. Laughable Lyrics. A Fourth Book of Nonsense Poems, Songs, Botany Music, &c, 1877

More songs were published posthumously in the 1912 collection of his Nonsense edited by Lady Strachey, and a few more by Davidson in his 1938 biography and in Teapots and Quails (1952).

Many of these songs are not as nonsensical as the limericks, and have often been interpreted as a reductio ad absurdum of Romantic poetry. By Bowra (The Romantic Imagination, 1950, p. 279), for example:

He differs from his models not in his means but in his end. He wished to write nonsense, and with the insight of genius saw that the romantic technique was perfectly suited to it. With him the romantic indefinitness passes beautifully into absurdity, and his own inchoate sorrows vanish in the divine light of nonsense.

Hugh Kenner (A Homemade World, 1975, p. 70) emphasizes the escapism implicit in such a practice:

Tennyson's friend Edward Lear at length perceived that the safest course for poetry, since its ligatures with phenomena were causing it so much trouble, was to shut itself up completely in its own cocoon of suggestion.

This is especially evident in poems such as The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò, which tells the story of an unrequited love, and The Dong with a Luminous Nose, clearly about feelings of solitude; these are usually considered reflections of Lear's personal condition.

The Stories

Lear only wrote two short stories in the traditional illustrated form:

• The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World
• The History of the Seven Families of the Lake Pipple-Popple

both published in his 1871 Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets. These are much more strictly nonsensical than the songs.

He seems to have preferred a fully illustrated type of short story with pictures and short descriptive captions, similar to his contemporary Rodolphe Töpffer's "histoires en estampes", which he used to draw for his friends and never published in his lifetime. Here is an example, from Teapots and Quails (1952):

• The Adventures of Mr. Lear, the Polly and the Pusseybite on their way to the Ritertitle Mountains

He also used this form to illustrate adventures from his travels, e.g. his Sicilian trip of 1847 with John Proby:

• Lear in Sicily

Alphabetical List of the Songs

• Akond of Swat, The (1877)
• At Dingle Bank (1912)
• Broom, the Shovel, the Poker and the Tongs, The (1871)
• But AH! (The Landscape Painter Said) (1912)
• Calico Pie (1871)
• Children of the Owl and the Pussy-cat, The (1938)
• Cold are the Crabs (1952)
• Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò, The (1877)
• Cummerbund. An Indian Poem, The (1877)
• Daddy Long-Legs and the Fly, The (1871)
• Dong with a Luminous Nose, The (1877)
• Duck and the Kangaroo, The (1871)
• Eclogue, Composed at Cannes, December 9th, 1867 (1912)
• Epitaph (1912)
• His Garden (1912)
• How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear (1912)
• Incidents in the Life of my Uncle Arly (1912)
• It Is a Virtue in Ingenuous Youth (1912)
• Jumblies, The (1871)
• Mr. and Mrs. Discobbolos (1877)
• Mr. and Mrs. Discobbolos (second part) (1877)
• Mr. and Mrs. Spikky Sparrow (1871)
• Mrs. Jaypher (1912)
• New Vestments, The (1877)
• Nutcrackers and the Sugar-Tongs, The (1871)
• Owl and the Pussycat, The (1871)
• Pelican Chorus, The (1877)
• Pobble Who Has No Toes, The (1877)
• Quangle Wangle's Hat, The (1877)
• Saith the Poet of Nonsense (1912)
• Scroobious Pip, The (1952)
• Spots of Greece (1912)
• Table and the Chair, The (1871)
• Two Limericks (1912)
• Two Old Bachelors, The (1877)
• When "Grand Old Men" Persist in Folly (1912)

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