the Return of the Repressed

- bpNichol

To coo over the queue of Q’s coup into Kõo.

the Mad Gardener’s Song

He thought he saw an Elephant,
  That practised on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
  A letter from his wife.
“At length I realize,” he said,
  ”The bitterness of Life!”

He thought he saw a Buffalo
  Upon the chimney-piece:
He looked again, and found it was
  His Sister’s Husband’s Niece.
“Unless you leave this house,” he said,
  ”I’ll send for the Police!”

He thought he saw a Rattlesnake
  That questioned him in Greek:
He looked again, and found it was
  The Middle of Next Week.
“The one thing I regret,” he said,
  ”Is that it cannot speak!”

He thought he saw a Banker’s Clerk
  Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
  A Hippopotamus.
“If this should stay to dine,” he said,
  ”There won’t be much for us!”

He thought he saw a Kangaroo
  That worked a coffee-mill:
He looked again, and found it was
  A Vegetable-Pill.
“Were I to swallow this,” he said,
  ”I should be very ill!”

He thought he saw a Coach-and-Four
  That stood beside his bed:
He looked again, and found it was
  A Bear without a Head.
“Poor thing,” he said, “poor silly thing!
  It’s waiting to be fed!”

He thought he saw an Albatross
  That fluttered round the lamp:
He looked again, and found it was
  A Penny-Postage Stamp.
“You’d best be getting home,” he said:
  ”The nights are very damp!”

He thought he saw a Garden-Door
  That opened with a key:
He looked again, and found it was
  A Double Rule of Three:
“And all its mystery,” he said,
  ”Is clear as day to me!”

He thought he saw a Argument
  That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
  A Bar of Mottled Soap.
“A fact so dread,” he faintly said,
  ”Extinguishes all hope!”

- Lewis Carroll

Poking out of the dream layer that covers Sylvie and Bruno are stanzas from this poem, which, with its mathematical structure and deadpan delivery, almost becomes the most sensible part of an otherwise fantastical story. Actually, the poem is the invention of a mad gardener who hobbles throughout the fairytale and delivers his song in short spurts (its stanzas sometimes separated by several chapters).

“The Mad Gardener’s Song” is Carroll’s last masterpiece, a nonsense poem that seems to, somehow, make its own sense. It embodies the duality of a man obsessed with mathematics — logical, knowable, systematic — and the extreme mystery of religion and God. A simple, solid structure runs underneath: x sees y; y is actually z. The structure is so strong that by the end, even if the reader feels uneasy about the impossibility of the imagery or the stacking of the non sequiturs, the poem’s logic begins to feel natural, as if the poem has answered its own absurd questions, or has at least invited the reader to relax and not worry about sense. To quote the last stanza:

He thought he saw a Argument
  That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
  A Bar of Mottled Soap.
“A fact so dread,” he faintly said,
  ”Extinguishes all hope”

When the Pope, who is possibly the most well-know living religious figure in the world and whom Carroll calls an “Argument” (for the duality of the known and unknown?), enters the stanza only to turn into soap, which is slippery and hard-to-grasp, the reader is forced to “extinguish all hope” in understanding all that the Pope represents. It is as if Carroll is telling the reader to accept that there are things that will always remain ungraspable, and that these things fall outside science and math and are better placed in the realm of the metaphysical. And this, of course, reflects the poems itself with its unbelievable images and silent structure ticking beneath.

“And all its mystery,” he said,
  ”Is clear as day to me!”

“Erthe toc of erthe erthe wyth woh”

Erthe toc of erthe erthe wyth woh.
Erthe other erthe to the erthe droh.
Erthe leyde erthe in erthene throh.
Tho heuede erthe of erthe erthe ynoh.

- Anonymous

Various translations of this Middle English poem can be found online. My favorite:

Earth took of earth earth with ill;
Earth other earth gave earth with a will.
Earth laid earth in the earth stock-still:
Then earth in earth had of earth its fill.

There are also several versions of the original which, judging from its widespread inclusion in incunabula across the centuries, seems to have been a popular poem. “Erthe upon Erthe” collects these variations and gives historical background.

It is a remarkable little thing. The repetition of “earth” makes it easy to remember; and as that word repeats, the meaning changes slightly: planet, ground, soil, tomb. The earth becomes not just the land on which we live, but also the opening in that land where we go to die. Ominous!

Hunter Trials

It’s awf’lly bad luck on Diana,
  Her ponies have swallowed their bits;
She fished down their throats with a spanner
  And frightened them all into fits.

So now she’s attempting to borrow.
  Do lend her some bits Mummy, do;
I’ll lend her my own for to-morrow,
  But to-day I‘ll be wanting them too.

Just look at Prunella on Guzzle,
  The wizardest pony on earth;
Why doesn’t she slacken his muzzle
  And tighten the breach in his girth?

I say, Mummy, there’s Mrs. Geyser
  And doesn’t she look pretty sick?
I bet it’s because Mona Lisa
  Was hit on the hock with a brick.

Miss Blewitt says Monica threw it,
  But Monica says it was Joan,
And Joan’s very thick with Miss Blewitt,
  So Monica’s sulking alone.

And Margaret failed in her paces,
  Her withers got tied in a noose,
So her coronets caught in the traces
  And now all her fetlocks are loose.

Oh, it’s me now. I’m terribly nervous.
  I wonder if Smudges will shy.
She’s practically certain to swerve as
  Her Pelham is over one eye.

                    * * * * *

Oh wasn’t it naughty of Smudges?
  Oh, Mummy, I’m sick with disgust.
She threw me in front of the Judges,
  And my silly old collarbone’s bust.

- John Betjeman

Betjeman was a poet of proper nouns. Prunella, Smudges, Guzzle, Diana, Miss Blewitt — all names for posh girls and ponies. The diction is both ridiculously British (“the wizardest pony on earth”!) or equestrian jargon (loose fetlocks and whatnot). Pelham bits being taboo for inexperienced riders, the girls probably come from old families with old money and horses in their heritage.

Conjugal Love

amo
amas
amat
amamus
amatis
a mantis

- Alan Riddell

This is a found poem from a Latin textbook. I saw. I came. I consumed.

Summer Poem

In midsummer
the way between our homes
is blocked

the streets snowed up
and neither of us
wants to be the first
to clear away the snow

I remember that you were
not too keen on toil

and I have always
been fond of
snow

- Gerður Kristný

Kristný is Icelandic, which explains the snow in summertime. I like this poem for what it doesn’t say; the relationship between the narrator and the other is as presumed as the path beneath the snow.

[Poem first published in KIN]

Richard the Third in a Fourth of a Second

The Essential Shakespeare, Volume I
Rapid-retrieval editions in rhymed hemimeter

ACT I

Clop.

Clop-
clop.

But
look
what
Hop-
toad
did.

Wid-
ow’d,

ACT II

woo’d,

took

this
lewd
and
stin-
king
thing
this
En-
gland.

ACT III

Clop-
pit-
y
clop
he
swap
it
fer
some
horse.

ACT IV

Flum-
mer-
y
of
course.

Cov-
er
stor-
y
for
the
hoi-
po-
lloi.

ACT V

Good;

we
would-
n’t
want
the
slu-
bbered
herd

ACT VI

thin-
king
which
nerd
murd-
ered
Rich-
ard
Third.

- George Starbuck

A bare bones exhumation of Shakespeare’s deform’d, unfinish’d king?

A syllable is nothing more than the smallest phonetical unit of a word, a vocalic boulder with consonantal tufts of grass sprouting before and after. As Starbuck shows, syllables do funny things when cleft from their crags: thinking breaks to thin king, stinking becomes stin king oozing from the odiferous En gland. Eek. But then everything ends in a landslide of -urds, -erds, and words, reburying the body.