Comments on: Edward Lear

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:52:45 +0000

Thanks, Dick Davis! Everybody should read Dick Davis’ own poetry too…
The work I’ve read on the subject (mostly by Franklin Lewis– anyone know him?) suggests that qasida/qasideh mean two different things in Persian poetry and in Arabic poetry, even though the word entered Persian from Arabic: the Persian qasida always has a radif (even before it evolves into the ghazal); the Arabic qasida is not a form but a genre of poetry, and has no radif.
In what sense is the radif not a refrain?

By: Dick Davis

Dick Davis — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 13:25:02 +0000

Steve asks if I will follow up on his comment, which I’m happy to try to do. Qasideh and qasida are different transliterations of the same word; the word is originally Arabic but is used in Persian too (virtually all Persian words to do with prosody are Arabic loan words). The qasideh is a monorhyme with an additional rhyme half way through the first line. As the very long lines of Arabic and Persian poetry are usually lineated in translations as two lines, this looks as though the rhyme scheme is
a
a
b
a
c
a
d
a
etc . . .
In Lear’s poem the monorhyme is from “swat” “not” “hot” etc . . .
As Steve says, the qasida / qasideh proper has no refrain. The “refrain” in Lear’s poem is a variant of what’s called a “radif” in Persian, a phrase that comes after the monorhyme every time it appears. The couplets that Lear has added before the monorhyme ar not a feature of the qasida / qasideh. However his poem is I think close enough in form and content to tie it to the qasida/ qasideh as its model; it’s a kind of mock qasida / qasideh with an additonal formal twist (the couplets). And because the form was, and is, associated with Islamic courts (including Indian Islamic courts) it was an appropriate form for Lear to choose with which to write about someone from the province of Swat (which is a real place in the northern subcontinent, which was giving the Brits in India trouble in Lear’s time, in case anyone reading this wasn’t aware of that).

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 06:16:08 +0000

Thanks for your comments! Speaking of Ashbery, I am quite serious, too, about the innovative or experimental nature of Lear’s work. He took cadences from Tennyson and other Victorian writers (on hears Arnold as well in “Cold are the Crabs”) and applied them to nonsense–or applied nonsense to those cadences–and it is fascinating to see the result, which is able to reproduce emotional effects even while the words seem to be completely silly. Yet the result is not satire, for one feels, for whatever reason, the melancholy behind the experiment is genuine. Not to pile too much scholia, though, on what should rightly be pleasurable “escape art.”

By: Don Share

Don Share — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 18:41:05 +0000

Great post, Alicia!
There’s some Lear (and Carroll) in Auden, too, who wrote (in the Birmingham Town Crier, 28 October 1938):
“It is not an accident that Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, the two great English masters of nonsense, were both Victorians, for it was in the Victorian age that the atomisation of society into solitary individuals, which is one of the effects of laissez-faire capitalism, first began to be felt actively.”
He goes on to point out that both were from the upper middle class, the class in which “social isolation is first felt.” And both were bachelors interested in children and family life. However, for Auden, Carroll is “happier and drier” – he is “classical” – while Lear is a “romantic rebel, who finds the real world unbearable; his poems are homesick of a lost happiness.” Auden figures that Carroll’s portmanteau words are intellectual abstractions (fruminous = fuming/furious) and Lear’s are “governed, like Milton’s, by the emotional value of the sound.”
The social theorists among us might be amused by Auden’s concluding, in the same piece, that “if we are Socialists, we must not be prigs and talk contemptuously of escape art. For [Carroll and Lear] succeeded; their work can be enjoyed by everybody, it is democratic; and it is only Fascists who imagine that they can create a society so perfect that no one will ever want to criticise or escape from it.”

By: Steve

Steve — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 18:17:52 +0000

Cool! I didn’t know about the Akond. I wonder if he was a precedent for Babe Ruth’s later title as the Sultan?
I suppose the Akond is a qasideh in the Persian sense of qasideh, praise poems which acquired early on the couplet form later adopted by the ghazal– there’s also, apparently, an early Arabic-language form called the qasida, which unlike the Persian form of the same name, and unlike the ghazal properly so-called in any language, has no refrains. Corrections and additions from Dick Davis, Alicia or anyone else welcome.
Has anyone else noticed that Ashbery for the past fifteen or so years has been thinking constantly about E. Lear? (I think he’s thinking about K. Lear as well, but certainly E. Lear is all over the place.)