Humorous Poems – Dec 3, 2021

 

Eliot originally wrote these poems for sharing with his godchildren, later collecting them in a book that used his nickname given by Ezra Pound.

The Covid19 virus continues to keep people apart but the readers were determined to use digital methods to meet over the Internet the entire year using the Zoom app. While we might have enjoyed each other's company more if we were physically close, the distance has not been an insuperable obstacle, as this session of humorous poems showed.

We dressed in fancy ways to illustrate the whimsical poems we were reading. We extracted all the humour that rhyme and nonsense encourage. How is it one may ask that a serious poet not given to rhyme, one whose fame arrived with The Waste Land expressing the sombre fears and brokenness of four years of the first world war, could write with freedom and comic verve on the threshold of yet another war? But that's exactly what T.S. Eliot did in one of the poems recited (The Naming of Cats)

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
     It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
     When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

...

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,

     The reason, I tell you, is always the same:

His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation

     Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:

Lear's original 1846 Book of Nonsense was composed of limericks. Later other poems like the famous Owl and the Pussy Cat were added.

There is no doubt that humour and nonsense bring out the best in poetry. How memorable these poems are; fortunate those who are introduced to them as children for they leave in their wake the unending joy of remembering and reciting them !