Humour of every variety and form, extending even to the hallowed sonnet and the Bard, were chosen by the readers to exemplify the kind of verse that turns a wry smile at the corner of one’s lips, if not an outright guffaw. Thus Sonnet 138 of Shakespeare with its puns (‘Therefore I lie with her and she with me’) excites the mind as much as it thrills the funny bone.
Devika chose a poem that confessed the woes of a regular churchgoer in a village in Wales who had tried to keep his eyes from straying to the eligible young women who attended services at the local parish church. They cursed him for his adulterous looks and the poor fellow, in spite of his staring, never managed to get a girl, and remained forever ‘wry–necked without a mate.’
We met the old woman who swore to ‘wear purple with a red hat’ in 2013 when Amita Palat recited Jenny Joseph’s poem Warning. But did we know that this poem became the rallying cry of a society for women’s freedom, called the Red Hat Society? Sue Ellen Cooper of Fullerton, California, gave her friend a vintage red fedora and a copy of Warning for her 55th birthday. She went on to found the popular Red Hat Society; at their public gatherings the women wore red hats and purple outfits!
Jenny Joseph – When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple
P.G Wodehouse was the author of a poem full of humour and indignation – an offended writer shoots the printer who committed intolerable misprints of his text. The judge at the trial sympathises because he has had similar dismal encounters; he quashes the jury’s verdict and dismisses the case in splendid rhyme:
I hereby quash and override
The jury's verdict. Gosh!' he cried.
‘Give me your hand. Yes, I insist,
You splendid fellow! Case dismissed.’
Poems by Anonymous have been famous, but we have not met a Mr. Nobody before in verse who does such mischief that cannot be traced to any living person. KumKum introduced the humorous verse of the unknown author. However we do recall Emily Dickinson’s short poem:
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
Reminds one that the poet had anticipated the purpose of much of social media today, such as Twitter.
Group pic
Pamela in her lion’s head outfit gave voice to the little boy who visited the zoo and got swallowed by a lion. Albert’s Return is a hilarious poem in which we witness the parents of the unfortunate boy, about to receive the insurance cover on his life policy, when the mother tells the agent who has come to collect the monthly premium:
Our Albert's been et by a lion;
You've got to pay us for a change!
Priya recited a poem conveying the regret of a girl who didn’t listen to her mother, and neglected to care for teeth; she now faces the pain of the dentist’s chair:
If I’d known I was paving the way
…
The murder of fillin’s,
Injections and drillin’s,
I’d have thrown all me sherbet away.
Cat Morgan Introduces Himself
The cat poems of T.S Eliot not only provided relaxation and leisure to the poet and the little children of his friends for whom he wrote it, but they continue to entertain millions who read the poems today, and have seen the phenomenally successful musical Cats composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, based upon the 1939 collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats by T. S. Eliot. Cat Morgan Introduces Himself is the final poem and represents a cat who has become the resident watchman in front of Faber & Faber’s London premises in Bloomsbury, where TSE worked as director.
I once was a Pirate what sailed the 'igh seas -
But now I've retired as a com-mission-aire:
And that's how you find me a-taking' my ease
And keepin' the door in a Bloomsbury Square.
We had two poems from the pen of Lewis Carroll, The Mad Gardener’s Song and Jabberwocky. Both are pieces of Carroll’s fantastic imagination. In the first a series of hallucinations dogs the subject of the poem and as he surveys various scenes and then recoils when a completely different fantasy is revealed below what appears at first sight:
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!
Hippopotamus descending from the bus
Jabberwocky is an even more high-spirited flight of fancy. The father warns the son:
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
The son was watchful and took care of the Jabberwock:
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
The significant feature of this poem is the invention of new portmanteau words – Lewis Carroll's term for a blend, a word into which are packed the sense (and sound) of two words, e.g. slithy for lithe and slimy. Jabberwocky, a poem from Through the Looking Glass, has words like frabjous, chortle, vorpal, frumious, mimsy, etc. which have all entered the dictionary.
