Laugh Lines

“His wit is not of the splendid or ambitious kind,” Samuel Johnson wrote of Falstaff, Shakespeare’s tragic comic: rather, it “consists in easy escapes and sallies of levity, which make sport but raise no envy.” In an essay in the July/August 2015 issue of Poetry, Anthony Madrid examines the easy escapes and sallies of levity that characterize the limerick. After describing the achievements of Edward Lear, master of light verse, he provides choice examples of his own experiments with the form:

There was an old man with a backpack:
No body could beat him at blackjack.
When they said, “Let us win!” he would finger his chin,
And then beat ’em to pieces at blackjack.

Here, Madrid toys expertly with the possibilities of “unambitious” wit. The backpack has nothing to do with anything, least of all its owner’s success in blackjack. And rather than advancing the narrative, the second half of the poem repeats information given in the first while adding barely relevant, or credible, details: when’s the last time you saw someone “finger his chin”? The fact that Madrid rhymes “blackjack” with “blackjack,” a claustrophobically close rhyme with “backpack,” enhances the poem’s sense of stasis (and silliness). Madrid harnesses the humor of the feint, the digression, the delay—and in so doing, “makes sport” of any reader who expects an ordinary poem.

The art accompanying the poem highlights this delightful absurdity: that pointless backpack, granted an ostensible place of honor at the end of Madrid’s first line, takes on a towering form, as though the whole poem revolves around it. Its frame extends into the air like a ladder, poking through a hole in the man’s ceiling—nearly extending beyond the image itself, as if to echo how Madrid’s limerick pushes poetry’s limits.

Some of his other limericks make use of a classic trope of the form, the mention of a location at the end of the first line. As one might expect, the place names turn out to be of no significance whatsoever: 

There was an old person from Burnside:
His garden was good ’til his fern died.
He threw it a funeral, and said, “Play a tune, or I’ll
Sink in despair, since my fern died.”

This poem’s fern is the other poem’s backpack: an utterly inconsequential item that’s nonetheless critical to the narrative. And to our beleaguered Burnsider: his whole garden (a modest affair, no doubt) hinged on that one fern, and so did his happiness. The repetition of “fern died” reinforces the significance of his fronded friend. And the poem’s other rhyme pair is remarkable for another reason: “funeral” and “tune, or I’ll” constitute what Madrid refers to as a “stunt” rhyme, a rhyme wholly distinct from the simpler kind favored by Lear.

Stunt rhymes, Madrid writes, “show that my rhyme praxis is tainted with modern assumptions about rhyme — viz., that rhymes ought to make some show of originality. That they ought to be admirable in themselves.” What’s the effect of original and admirable rhymes? One is to distract us momentarily from the poem’s content—a reasonable shift when the poem, in a sense, has no content—and make us think, instead, about its craft. Here, notice that “tune, or I’ll” occurs at the very moment the poem draws attention to its rhyme scheme, its own tune. Perhaps this poem could be understood as the music the man requests—an ironic funeral dirge.

The tombstone-shaped image that accompanies this poem uses black and gray to capture the gardener’s despair. As in the other picture, sizes are off: some flowers loom over the man’s head, whereas the trees seem stunted—a fine reflection of the limerick’s emotional disproportionality. Only the man, and the fern’s gravestone, boast color, as if to highlight their connection.

How does this image influence your understanding of the poem? The gravestone looks like a person’s, not a fern’s—a logical touch, since this man mourns his plant as he’d mourn a person—and the man stands before it with his head in his hands. The sadness of the scene hints at the sadness underlying the poem’s jokiness. Yes, it’s silly to mourn dead ferns—but don’t we mourn them, or their equivalents, all the time? Aren’t even small sorrows worth poems and pictures? A streak of seriousness runs behind even the lightest verse: the blacks and grays that make bright colors pop.