A Blog of Bosh

“Edward Lear’s Tribute to the Moon”
A humourous exchange providing a deep interpretation of Lear’s limerick on the Old Man of the Hague.
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Excelsior
[H.W. Longfellow’s famous poem, Jams Thurber’s illustrated version, and a “Parody” attributed to Edward Lear. One of these days I am going to publish a scan of the manuscript, in the State Library of Victoria.]

Don’t be so beastly!
There was a time when you could sing, ‘I love little pussy, her coat is so warm’ without fear of innuendo. There was no pun intended when Edward Lear wrote, ‘O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love, what a beautiful Pussy you are.’ Puss or pussy has been the nursery term for a cat since the early 16th century. For almost as long, of course, it has also been used to denote sexual intercourse, a woman and female genitalia. (It is safe to assume, for example, that the toast, ‘Here’s a health to thee, to Pusse and to good company’, recorded in 1664, was not a tribute to Tibbles.) But not everyone was familiar with tavern slang, and pussy remained a term of endearment for women, as well as cats, well into the 19th century.
[This interesting articles will explain why searching for The Owl and the Pussy-cat with a child on your lap is not a good idea.]
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian

Four larks and a wren
EDWARD Lear was no doubt thinking of the famous skylark of England, two pairs having nests in his beard. The UK has three lark species and Africa has 80% of all the world’s 75 lark species. Larks are mostly concentrated in the Old World in their distribution. The Horned Lark alone has colonised South America (Colombia).
[This is actually about larks, but I could not resist…]
The Natal Witness Group

Utter Nonsense
A nice general introduction to Lear for the Brazilian edition of Speak Up, a magazine for foreign students of English.

The height of nonsense
In 1886, the redoubtable Victorian critic John Ruskin was invited by the Pall Mall Gazette of London to draw up a “List of the Best Hundred Authors.” His top choice wasn’t quite what the Gazette’s high-minded editors had in mind: “I really don’t know any author to whom I am half so grateful for my idle self,” Ruskin wrote, “as Edward Lear. I shall put him first of my hundred authors.” With a hint of impishness, Ruskin declared Lear’s 1846 “Book of Nonsense” — a children’s book published under a pseudonym that eventually reached a whopping 19 printings during the author’s lifetime — to be “surely the most beneficent … of all books yet produced.” He went on to proclaim its unusual contents — a curious verse form we now call the limerick, accompanied by Lear’s equally curious pen-and-ink drawings — as “inimitable and refreshing.”
Lear’s vast outpouring of nonsense — from those early limericks, which established tomfoolery as a bona fide literary genre, to his beloved masterpiece, “The Owl and the Pussycat” (about the duo that famously went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat) — remains as Ruskin described it: instantly appealing, stunningly original, fiercely opposed to pretense and brimming with humor, melancholy and mystery.
Los Angeles Times | 5 January 2003