THERE are basically two varieties of nonsense words. The first is the unintentional and the second is the intentional. The former is common in speech and much semi-educated writing. The latter has become a minor genre in literature, especially during the last 150 years. The best part of this genre is the fact that it is never intended to make formal sense. Nevertheless it has a kind of internal lunatic logic of its own and often comprises enigmatic variations on the absurd. Most of it is verse, but there is some prose; for example, the patter and punning and intricate witticisms of Shakespearean Fools (especially in King Lear).
When I sat down to search for some of the nonsensical poetry I was literally shocked by the result. There are some early instances from the middle ages: a poem, About Nothing by William of Aquitaine. There is quite a lot of anonymous nonsense verse in English, French and Latin dating from the 15th and 16th century. In fact in the 17th century, nonsense as a concept, idea or phenomenon can be seen as a contrast to ‘good sense’. But the more ‘sober’ writers regarded these ‘nonsense writers’ as bad or useless, writers with inferior or absurd ideas and inferior powers of communication skills. As the intentional nonsense writing had flourished, there was a certain amount of anonymous verse and such poems as A New Song of New Similes by John Gay, which begins:
My passion is as mustard strong;
I sit all sober sad;
Drunk as a piper all day long;
Or like a March-hare mad.
To my surprise even Doctors made ‘good nonsense’. Dr Johnson, with perhaps slightly unexpected skittishness, composed little verses that might have been written by Lewis Carroll. For example:
I put my hat upon my head;
And walked into the strand,
And there I met another man;
Whose hat was in his hand.
But if I was given an opportunity to select the best nonsense poem, there will have to be three winners. Samuel Foote produced one of the classic nonsense poems - The Great Panjandrum:
So she went into the garden;
To cut a cabbage leaf
To make an apple pie;
And at the same time
A great she-bear, coming down the street,
Pops its head into the shop.
What! No soap?
So she died.
Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll both belong to a long tradition of nonsense makers, not least the makers of jingles and nursery rhymes. Lear even went on to compose A Book of Nonsense. The one that I found extremely funny was:
There was an Old Lady of Chertsey,
Who made a remarkable Curtsey;
She twirled round and round,
Till she sunk underground,
This distressed the people of Chertsey.
The third favourite will have to be this anonymous nonsense verse:
Ah, ra, chikera,
Roly, poly, pickena,
Kinny, minny, festi,
Shanty-poo,
Ickerman, chikerman, chinee-choo.
There have been a number of theories to explain the greater popularity of nonsense and absurd. The one with the crazier element will have to be the end of my most nonsensical article.
As long ago as 1901 GK Chesterton, one of the ‘philosophers’ of nonsense, touched upon the teleological theme in A Defence of Nonsense:
“This simple sense of wonder at the shape of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality as it is the basis of nonsense. Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the sole things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook.”
