A Lilting Legacy: Light Verse

Skip the B.S.

By Skip Eisiminger

“. . . if you’ve ever learned ‘Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,’ you will doubtless recall that he ‘jumped over a candlestick.’ And if you ever listened to the exploits of ‘Old King Cole,’ you no doubt remember that he was ‘a merry old soul’ because rhyme has fixed the words in memory the way ‘hypo’ once fixed photographic images on paper.” Skip Eisiminger

“[Rhyme is] a barbarous and troublesome bondage.”—John Milton

“He knew/himself to sing and build a lofty rhyme.”—John Milton

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—/28/2013—I have been a writer of heavy and light verse for over 30 years but, as a reader and listener, I’ve loved the lighter genre for almost twice as long.

Some of my earliest memories are of my mother recounting the exploits of Jack Sprat, Little Miss Muffet, and Diddle-Diddle Dumpling, My Son John. I find it sadly fascinating that the songs and rimes of childhood are often recalled when dementia patients cannot remember the names of their own children. This should not be surprising given that Mother Hubbard enjoys a twenty-to-thirty-year advantage over any actual children in most American brains.

As I have observed elsewhere, the mind is like an onion, and the memories imprinted on the layers nearest the core are among the last to be peeled off.

In other words, if you’ve ever learned “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,” you will doubtless recall that he “jumped over a candlestick.” And if you ever listened to the exploits of “Old King Cole,” you no doubt remember that he was “a merry old soul,” because rhyme has fixed the words in memory the way “hypo” once fixed photographic images on paper.

Rhyme was born in about 1500 BC in the Zoroastrian Avesta. It enjoyed occasional use in the works of Homer, Euripides, Ovid, and Virgil, but it was first used as a mnemonic tool in a Dominican monastery. About 1350, a French monk recast all the rules of business mathematics into 137 Latin couplets. There was nothing light about them.

Following this ancient lead, a contemporary student figured out a way to recall pi to the twentieth place by setting it to the following pi-philological rime:

 

Sir, I send a rhyme excelling

In sacred truth and rigid spelling

Numerical sprites elucidate

For me the lexicon’s dull weight.

 

Get it? I didn’t either, but it’s easy enough once you realize that the length of each word is the key. “Sir” contains three letters; the comma is the decimal; “I” has one letter; “send,” four; “a,” one; “rhyme,” five; and “excelling,” nine: 3.14159 and so forth to the twentieth place, but I have forgotten how one gets past the sixth digit. For this left-handed plumber, I find “righty tighty, lefty loosey” more useful than pi drawn and quartered into 20 pieces.

Though Ogden (“The Fertile Turtle”) Nash died in 1971, for most readers of English over 60, light verse means Ogden Nash and, if Nash is dead, so is light verse. You won’t find it in Poetry or The New Yorker, but if you keep your ears open, you’ll soon hear Nash’s spirit-rappin’. Indeed, the reader is welcome to take sole possession of rap unless it’s that sub-genre of hip hop that parodies itself. One of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits features a rime-besotted Chris Rock interviewing a White writer. “Waz up? Waz up?” says the rapper, who continues:

 

“I’m Warren Ski, to the highest degree, to the TLP,

And sittin’ by my side is my main man,

My toucan Sam, my ace-boon coon,

My brand new tune, my Vidal Sassoon,

My loony tune, my Daniel Boone,

My ancient rune, my big balloon,

My wrinkled prune, my gold doubloon,

My cat in the cradle in a silver spoon,

Little boy blue, and the man in the moon . . . .”

 

At this point, there is a commercial break for “Bullet-Hole Tampons,” “because sometimes you bleed in other places.”

Despite the popularity of rap, I imagine most Americans would say “Hallmark” if you asked them about the current production of light verse. Since its 19th-century origins, the greeting card has employed metrical language de-light-fully as in these verses that I received in a Father’s Day card from my son:

 

“Love is such a funny thing;

it’s very like a lizard;

it twines itself around your heart

and penetrates your gizzard.”

 

I decided that that was so much fun, I would write one of my own. When my wife got sick on a visit to her ancestral home in Germany, I wrote her:

 

“Dearest, I send you this card with affection

Hoping you beat that yeast infection.”

 

Though she was not amused, she did love something we heard in the stands at one of our grandson’s T-ball games: “We want a pitcher, not a belly itcher.” Sports cheers (“Rah, rah, rah, sis, boom, bah”) have a way, like jump-rope rhymes (“Bluebells, cockleshells, easy ivy over.”) of hanging around for centuries regardless of their absurdity. If it rhymes, it’s a keeper. Unless my ear deceives me, it seems that, in recent years, many cheers have picked up a rap rhythm:

 

“We’re rough, we’re tough,

We’re here to call your bluff!

We itch, we scratch,

We do the cabbage patch!

We roll, we stroll,

We do the Tootsie Roll.

And now and then, we dip,

Baby, dip, baby, dip!

If you don’t like our apples,

Don’t shake our trees!

We’re the Clemson Tigers

Doin’ what we please!”

 

A fair number of poets from the last century whom few of us think of when we think of Ogden Nash were light versifiers. I’m thinking mainly of T.S. Eliot. Eliot unfortunately did not live long enough to see Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats brought to the stage as the musical Cats, which enjoyed a twenty-one-year run on London’s West End. My own personal favorite is “Macavity: The Mystery Cat” from which this couplet is drawn:

 

“Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity,

He’s broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.”

 

Likewise, many popular songs when spoken instead of sung read like light verse. When Steve Allen was hosting his own television show in the 1950s, he once appeared, wearing a tuxedo, standing on a darkened stage at a lectern lit by a solitary spot light. He then opened a portfolio and read the following lyrics as solemnly as any Calvinist preacher:

 

“You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,

Cryin’ all the time.

Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit,

And you ain’t no friend of mine . . . .”

 

The double negative had finally been given its rightful place, which cannot be said of the limerick:

 

The limerick packs laughs anatomical

Into space that is quite economical.

But the good ones I’ve seen,

So seldom are clean,

And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

 

Like most limericks, this minor masterpiece is anonymous, but here’s a rhyme I know the author of because I wrote it. It was written on the retirement of a colleague, a man of legendary reproductive talents (or so he claimed):

 

There once was a Thurmond constituent

Who bragged of his own large endowment;

He streaked a convention,

Caught a florist’s attention,

And won for the best dried arrangement.

 

From Washington (“Fritz and Grits”) to Madison Avenue (“OshKosh, B’Gosh”), light verse still holds its own but, since my own time is running short in more ways than one, I will conclude with my epitaph, titled “Cutting It Just Right”:

 

I thought of my life

as a wooden bust—

less than life-size, mind you,

nothing august.

 

Every day I’d chisel,

rasp, sand, and trust

that with my last breath

I’d blow off the dust.

 

Note: The artwork used to illustrate this column was created by high school student Rose Szczur. Read more about this award-winning work at http://www.csfreshink.com/group/briargate/forum/topics/rampart-student-is-a-semi?xg_source=activity&region_name=Glenwood_Grove_-_North_Iris_Boulder_CO&page_number=1&page_type=StoriesController&publication_id=1502.

Further Reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avesta and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hound_Dog_%28song%29