Edward Lear's poetry is flawless for the times. There's nothing like The Jumblies to put my daily voyage on the high-tech seas into perspective. A coherent narrative by the second stanza I discovered myself wondering what would happen to
these . . . things . . . on such a spirited adventure in so unseaworthy a ship.
Lear was born May 12, 1812 and like Dante Gabriel Rosetti, also born on May 12, Lear was a landscape painter. Travelling in Greece and Italy under the patronage of the Earl of Derby for whose children he created the Book of Nonesense (1846). But the similarities end here and Lear could hardly be more different because unlike Rossetti, Lear did not take literature seriously.
Timlessly classic, Carl Sagan was inspired to use the verse:
Few and far, far and few
Are the lands where the Jumblies live:
Their heads are green and their hands are blue;
And they went to sea in a sieve.
As his lead in to chapter 29 in Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966), which walks the reader through the now classic estimation of the number of technological civilizations in our galaxy. He use of the rhyme encapsulated the folly of casting fragile living bodies into the void of space, when radio signals would serve nearly as well.
On it's surface one meaning of The Jumblies is clear -- they gratify themselves not by obedience but by defiance of common sense and the views of the majority. They come with strangely colored heads and hands from far away and the Jumblies are not only "far" but "few." Outsiders and nonconformists breaking from convention to show a path that others might follow.
Much of the poem's delight lies in the fragile use of details -- the "pinky paper all folded neat," in the "lovely Monkey with lollipop paws." Heartwarming are the traces of imagery found in the verses -- in the sieve, in the "small tobacco-pipe mast," in the "crockery-jar" in which they pass the night -- a picture in words of the physical smallness and frailty of the Jumblies.
A whimsical and jolly poem written in couplets, triplets, and quatrains, Lear excelled at inventing place names using repetition as in Quangle Wangle. Edgar Allan Poe made up half the places he wrote about. So did Coleridge. Lear and Tennyson held each other's work in high regard; his charm and spontaneous nonsense has been carried on by later writers, such as Laura E. Richards (Tirra Lirra (1932) and A.A. Milne (When We Were Very Young, 1924 ), Dr. Seuss was much influenced by him. Lear's invented words, some of which now hold a place in the dictionary, his "melobious" metres, as he called them along with his ridiculously-compressed stories were altogether novel in 1846. Indeed, they were as "far and few, far and few," as "the lands where the Jumblies lived." And they were as hilariously funny to Lear himself as they were to his readers.
Awaiting children in Edward Lear's nonsense world is gentle satire.....super-cautious and overly protective are the adults who leap to conclusions, assume the worst but by the end change their mind and join the Jumblies who go to sea in a sieve, and "all came back in twenty years, or more." Most children's literature writers were painters first; literature was a sideline during the times and the composition date is unknown. He originally dashed off these verses for the amusement of the children, but the idea soon became infused with his deep alienation from Victorian society. A canonical verse from the Victorian Age it first appeared 1846, was expanded by Lear in 1861; further expanded upon in 1863. The poem is not really nonsense at all, but a beautifully profound allegory comparable to the Alice stories by Lewis Carroll, a contemporary and a rich breeding-ground for nonsense writing -- "It is not too much to say that Lear is a powerful poet in his world of nonsense," said Angus Ross.
His name is synonymous with nonsense verse and this might be an indication of Lear's character that he wrote nonsense extremely well. As a teen he found artistic work drawing zoological specimens for illustrated books and gave drawing lessons to Queen Victoria. Plagued by epilepsy and depression he left England after 1837 returning only occasionally until his death at San Remo in January 1888.
Sources:
Edward Lear:
http://members.fortunecity.com/beatlesound/lear_edward.htm
Nelson Bentley - Children's Literature Writing Workshop:
www.oz.net/~beastly/child-wp.htm
Tasty Bits from the Technology Front:
www.tbtf.com/archive/1997-09-01.html