Childhood: A Journal for the Study and
Research of Children’s Culture
‫ כתב עת לחקר תרבות ילדים‬:‫ילדּות‬
1 ‫גיליון מספר‬
Volume No. 1
‫ ד"ר גליה שנברג‬,‫ ד"ר שי רודין‬,‫ ד"ר שרה מאיר‬:‫מערכת‬
Editorial Board: Dr. Sara Meyer, Dr. Shai Rudin,
Dr. Galia Shenberg
Academic Council: Professor Tamar Alexander,
Professor Miri Baruch, Professor William Freedman,
Professor Uzi Shavit, Professor Aliza Shenhar
,‫ פרופ' מירי ברוך‬,‫ פרופ' תמר אלכסנדר‬:‫מועצה אקדמית‬
‫ פרופ' עליזה שנהר‬,‫ פרופ' עוזי שביט‬,‫פרופ' ביל פרידמן‬
‫ המכללה לעיצוב‬,‫ באדיבות מכללת תילתן‬,‫ קסניה לוגובסקי‬:‫איור הכריכה‬
‫ולתקשורת חזותית‬
Cover Drawing: Ksenia Lugosky, by courtesy of Tiltan College for
Design & Multimedia
‫אלול תשע"ה‬
2015 ‫אוגוסט‬
August 2015
Copyright © 2015 by Gordon Academic College of
Education
All Rights Reserved
‫כל הזכויות שמורות למכללה האקדמית לחינוך גורדון‬
‫תקצירי המסות והמאמרים‬
‫”מעשה בגברת ושמה לורה“‪ :‬שירי הנונסנס של לורה ריצ'רדס‬
‫אתי גורדון גינזבורג‬
‫סופרת הילדים האמריקאית בת המאה ה‪ 19-‬לורה א‪ .‬ריצ'רדס (‪1850-‬‬
‫‪ ,)1943‬כתבה שירי ילדים שרבים מהם זוהו כשירי נונסנס‪ ,‬ולא בכדי‪.‬‬
‫ריצ'רדס הושפעה עמוקות מאדוארד ליר הבריטי‪ ,‬אבי ז'אנר הנונסנס‬
‫הוויקטוריאני‪ ,‬ובדומה לו הייתה גם היא מוכרת ואהובה בזמנה‪ .‬אבל‬
‫בניגוד לליר ולשיריו‪ ,‬שיריה של ריצ'רדס נשכחו והיא לא זכתה‬
‫למקום בדיונים האקדמיים על ז'אנר הנונסנס שליר התחיל והיא‬
‫המשיכה בארה"ב‪.‬‬
‫המאמר מבקש לבחון מחדש את שיריה של ריצ'רדס הן לאור‬
‫הגדרת ז'אנר הנונסנס כז'אנר ספרותי והן בהשוואה לליר‪ .‬הוא בוחן‬
‫את הסיבות להיעלמותה של ריצ'רדס גם בהקשר היסטורי‬
‫וביוגראפי‪ ,‬ומראה כיצד השתמשה ריצ'רדס במעמדה החברתי‬
‫הגבוה‪ ,‬כמו גם בתפיסות רווחות של מגדר‪ ,‬על מנת לעצב את‬
‫דמותה הציבורית ולהשפיע על האופן בו נקראו שיריה‪ .‬את המאמר‬
‫חותמת קריאה מחודשת בכמה משיריה המוכרים ביותר של ריצ'רדס‬
‫בהקשרם הביוגראפי וההיסטורי‪ .‬קריאה המגלה כותבת מתוחכמת‬
‫ומרתקת שהשכילה להשתמש בז'אנר הנונסנס על מנת לתת ביטוי‬
‫לתחושותיה כאם‪ ,‬כאישה וכאזרחית אמריקאית דעתנית וזאת מבלי‬
‫לעורר את דעת הקהל נגדה‪.‬‬
‫‪9‬‬
Childhood
Abstracts
“There Once Was a Lady Called Laura”:
Laura E. Richards's Nonsense Poetry
Etti Gordon Ginzburg
The long forgotten American writer, Laura Richards (18501943) wrote numerous children's poems that were often
classified as nonsense. This was for a reason, since
Richards was clearly influenced by her now canonized
British predecessor Edward Lear, whose work was used to
define the genre of nonsense. Unfortunately, Richards's
poems have been mostly treated literally as nonsense rather
than as literary nonsense, to the effect that it prevented
readers from seriously prying into her poetry; this fact has
nevertheless enabled Richards’s greater freedom of writing.
Indeed, Richards often created an impression of buoyancy
and of ad lib jingles while disguising acts of defiance and of
self exposure that were otherwise impossible for women of
her time and stature. In fact, quite a few of Richards’s
verses are menacing, and their aggressive, even cruel,
contents, though not new in children’s literature, are
incongruous with nineteenth-century American notions of
maternity. Many others give vent to personal strains, private
family predicaments, and parental discontents.
17
There Once Was a Lady Called Laura
Institute for the Blind in Massachusetts. Richards wrote two
autobiographies, biographies of her parents, a few adult
books, but mainly children’s literature.2 Most of the
numerous books that she wrote and edited are in prose, but
her writings also include collections of nursery and
nonsense poems.3 It is these poems that were responsible
for winning her the title “American Poet Laureate of
Nonsense for [C]hildren” along with Edward Lear (181288) in England (Donahue 55). Richards’s poems are often
appealing yet sometimes disturbing. Many abide by the
rules of literary nonsense; others are sophisticated and rich
and can easily appeal to adult audience. And yet, Richards
is little-known today, and her poems are hardly mentioned
in discussions on literary nonsense, the genre that her
British counterpart initiated and that she successfully
followed.
The present essay unfolds the unique personal and
cultural reasons that have thwarted any serious inspection
of Richards’s rhymes, and concludes by looking at
Richards's poems both in the context of literary nonsense
The articles
“There Once Was a Lady Called Laura”:
Laura E. Richards's Nonsense Poetry
Etti Gordon Ginzburg
In Memory of Dr. Nohar Nov (1968-2013)
There once was a Lady called Laura,
She lived on the verge of Gomorah;
She said, I will find
All the lame, sick and blind
And we all will read Browning to-morrer!
(JJB n.p.)1
The name of the nineteenth-century children’s writer Laura
Elizabeth Richards (1850-1943) hardly rings a bell among
Americans today unless it is mentioned alongside the name
of her famous mother, Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), who
wrote the words of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Her
father, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-76), is less known,
but was famous in his time mainly as head of the Perkins
1
2
Abbreviations refer to Richards’s books; full references can be found in
the works cited list. JJB is Jingle Jangle Book; SW is Stepping
Westward; WIYA is When I Was Your Age; HOD is The Hottentot and Other
Ditties and TL is Tirra Lirra.
3
176
Richards wrote two autobiographies: When I Was Your Age (1894) for
children and Stepping Westward (1932); a two-volume Pulitzerwinning biography of her mother, Julia Ward Howe (1916), that she
coauthored with her sisters; another collection of her mother’s writings
The Walk with God: Extracts from Private Journals of Julia Ward
Howe (1919); a biography of her father Samuel Gridley Howe (1935),
and a joint biography of her parents for children, Two Noble Lives:
Samuel Gridley Howe, Julia Ward Howe (1911)
Richard Cary counted one hundred and three published titles (344) and
Anne Stokes Alexander mentions ninety five (4).
Etti Gordon Ginzburg
and within the framework of Richards’s life and times.
Apparently, Richards, who was identified primarily as a
mother and as a children's writer, has, metaphorically
speaking, never left the nursery. Thus her children’s poems
have likewise never been acknowledged at a level where
they could be discussed in depth alongside the works of her
more famous male contemporary.
Soon, however, Lear’s nonsense poems encouraged
attempts to make sense of his poetry and define it as an
autonomous literary genre. In the course of this process
nonsense became distinguished from literary nonsense, and
the latter was no longer associated with trifles and with
children’s foolery but rather with an abstract ideal of
childhood. As early as 1901, Gilbert K. Chesterton described
nonsense as a “new literature” (126) with Lear as his primary
example. In 1925 Emile Cammaerts regarded nonsense as
“poetry run wild” referring mainly to Edward Lear and
Lewis Carroll (57; emphasis mine). Chesterton and
Cammaerts no longer associated nonsense with real children
but rather with the idea of the child as representing “the
childhood of the world” (Chesterton 123). Although these
critics usually commenced by connecting nonsense with the
nursery and with real children – “We owe the Book of
Nonsense to the Earl of Derby’s grandchildren” – they never
really meant it to stay there: “It is not the child, it is the
sensible man, who urgently requires the comforts and
blessings of Nonsense, and it is generally he who enjoys
them most” (Cammaerts 33, 35). Further dissociated from
children and their literature, Lear was described by Aldous
Huxley in 1920 as “a genuine poet” (167) on a par with
Marlowe, Milton, and Tennyson. In 1933 T.S. Eliot also
associated Lear with modern poetry, mentioning him
alongside Tennyson, Swinburne, Mallarme, and W.H. Auden
(Bark 566). Positioning Lear among canonical poets, no less
Literary Nonsense and the Exclusion of Richards
Literary nonsense is hard to define. The difficulty derives
from the denotative meaning of the word nonsense, which
is in itself elusive. According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, nonsense is most commonly understood as
“[in]substantial or worthless matter” and as “that which is
not sense.” This is exactly how most Victorians regarded
the works of Edward Lear and Laura Richards; their verses
were associated with silly humor and juvenile fun and were
classified as “the happy property of children and the
common man,” in accordance with the popular denotative
meaning of the word nonsense (Ede 3). Lear, who jotted
down his limericks to entertain the children at Knowsley,
where he worked as a painter, did so during breaks from
his work and never thought of his rhymes as art or valued
them on a par with his paintings; he most likely published
his Book of Nonsense (1846) more in hopes of fiscal gain
than because of his belief in the book’s literary merit
(Prickett 129).
177
There Once Was a Lady Called Laura
than the literary status of Huxley and Eliot, brought Lear’s
poetry to new territory and promoted his visibility.
Despite the popularity of Richards's works at the
beginning of the twentieth century, she has been barely
included in these scholarly discussions. It seems that whereas
for Richards children were real, for the literati the child has
become “a paradigm of the ideal man” (Boas 9), and Lear the
means for helping adults keep in touch with their “childlike
soul” (Cammaerts 35). According to this view, literary
nonsense (as opposed to the literal meaning of the word
nonsense) has very little to do with children at all. Jacqueline
Rose emphasizes this point as regards the entire category of
children’s literature: “There is no child behind the category
‘children’s fiction,’ other than the one which the category
itself sets in place, the one which it needs to believe is there
for its own purposes” (10).
Goose and Lear’s Nonsense Book” (SW 39). In an
unpublished manuscript, Richards provides an exact
imitation of Lear, including his typical anti-climactic
ending:
There was a young person of Asia,
She was troubled with rats and aphasia;
She put on her mittens
And bought her some Kittens
And hobble de wobbled to Asia.
(JJB n.p.; emphasis mine)
Although Richards rarely uses the form of the
limerick in her published works, probably for the sake of
novelty, she nevertheless follows principles of literary
nonsense, such as musicality, tension between chaos and
order, and emotional detachment, in her own way. “The
Owl and the Eel and the Warming-Pan” (TL 187), for
instance, is a celebration of sounds – of alliteration,
assonance, and rhymes – that lead to the verse’s chaotic and
climactic conclusion, in the spirit of Lear:
Including Richards in the Discussion
Some of Richards’s contemporaries, however, did notice
her resemblance to Lear. In a review that dates back to
1932, Louis Untermeyer compares Richards to Lear due to
her playfulness: “Mrs. Richards, they tell me, is 81 years
old. Do not believe it. Mrs. Richards is much older – as old,
I would say, as Edward Lear” (210). Indeed, Richards was
intimately familiar with Lear’s works as a child, and she
explicitly
acknowledged
his
influence
in
her
autobiographies: “There is a kind of deep familiarity that
seems to come from the beginning of things, as with Mother
THE owl and the eel and the warming-pan,
They went to call on the soap-fat man.
The soap-fat man he was not within:
He’d gone for a ride on his rolling-pin.
So they all came back by the way of the town,
And turned the meeting-house upside down.
In contrast to the poem’s tight structure, “The Owl and the
Eel” is chaotic and nonsensical, of course on condition that “the
178
Etti Gordon Ginzburg
Her uncle remarked it would conquer the Dutch:
She boiled her new bonnet,
And breakfasted on it,
And rode to the moon on her grandmother’s crutch.
familiar sequence of events in everyday life is to be taken as the
standard of order and sense” (Sewell 38). No standard of order is
followed in Richards’s four “Nonsense Verses” (TL 66-7), which
are similarly chaotic:
I
Nicholas Ned,
He lost his head,
And put a turnip on instead;
But then, ah me!
He could not see,
So he thought it was night, and he went to bed.
Richards achieves an effect of nonsense by upsetting the
familiar referential meaning of certain words and by disturbing
normative causality. In “Bobbily Boo and Wollypotump” (TL
136), for example, causality is odd: drinking tea and coffee turns
the king’s nose blue, and crying brings about his (and his wife’s)
annihilation:
BOBBILY BOO, the king so free,
He used to drink the Mango tea.
Mango tea and coffee, too,
He drank them both till his nose turned blue.
II
Ponsonby Perks,
He fought with Turks,
Performing many wonderful works;
He killed over forty,
High-minded and Haughty,
And cut off their heads with smiles and smirks.
Wollypotump, the queen so high,
She used to eat the Gumbo pie.
Gumbo pie and Gumbo cake,
She ate them both till her teeth did break.
III
Winfred White,
She married a fright,
She called him her darling, her duck, her delight;
The back of his head
Was so lovely, she said,
It dazzled her soul and enraptured her sight.
Bobbily Boo and Wollypotump,
Each called the other a greedy frump.
And when theses terrible words were said,
They sat and cried till they both were dead.
Although the poem ends violently, it does not arouse
any emotional response; instead it creates a detached
universe that is apart from the real world. Elizabeth Sewell
maintains that this kind of emotional detachment is a
IV
Harriet Hutch,
Her conduct was such,
179
There Once Was a Lady Called Laura
few letters for the sake of posterity,” she wrote in private
correspondence (Letter, 20 Aug. 1926). Although a careful
reading of Richards’s autobiographies reveals a far less
idyllic reality, and a childhood troubled by severe familial
tensions and traits of mental illness, the impression of a
perfect childhood has nevertheless prevailed. Ruth Hill
Viguers describes Richards as “a truly happy person” (87),
and Anne MacLeod asserts that “[w]riting verses, Laura
Richards drew on the loveliest legacy of her happy
childhood” (474).
Richards insisted on the construction of her public
image not only as a happy daughter of admirable parents
but also as a mother. Richards drew on the model
American woman, who was first and foremost a wife and a
mother, in accordance with conventional expectations of
middle-class womanhood in nineteenth-century America.
Often, however, women used these roles to justify activities
outside the nursery; Richards, who was a mother of seven
(one child, Maud, died in infancy), similarly exploited her
maternal position to justify her career, linking writing to
childrearing:
marked characteristic of literary nonsense since emotions
are alien to the genre of nonsense altogether (129).
Apparently, then, aspects of a poetics of nonsense
can apply to many of Richards’s verses. Moreover, even if
we follow scholars such as Sewell, Ede and Harmon, and
define literary nonsense by its proximity to the models
provided by Lear, then Richards’s poems certainly deserve
to be classified as literary nonsense. And yet, Richards has
remained associated with the literal meaning of the word
nonsense and her poetry is typically described as “cheerful
rubbish” (Woollcott 262) and as “[j]oyful [n]oise”
(Alexander 221).
In order to fully account for this disregard, one has to
adopt a broader perspective, and consider both Richards’s
aristocratic background, and the manner in which she
manipulated its construction. References to Richards’s
poetry usually draw on an uncritical reading of her two
autobiographies, When I Was Your Age (1893) and
Stepping Westward (1932), where the author describes an
idyllic childhood. It is quite obvious from these memoirs
that Richards was driven to write by an unusual childhood
and was heavily influenced by her parents, almost to the
point of obsession. Aware of their heroic standing in the
eyes of the American public, Richards was consciously
careful to maintain this reputation. Thus, she described an
Eden-like childhood and portrayed her parents as laudable
role models, carefully omitting any evidence that would not
suit the heroic representation of her family: “I keep very
I had always rhymed easily; now, with the coming
of the babies, and the consequent weeks and
months of quiet, came a prodigious welling up of
rhymes... I wrote and sang and wrote and could not
stop. The first baby was plump and placid, with a
broad, smooth back which made an excellent
writing desk. She lay on her front across my lap; I
180
Etti Gordon Ginzburg
wrote on her back, the writing pad quite as steady
as the writing of jingles required. (SW 156)
Without much worrying about it, writers and
publishers casually pin the name of nonsense
on things not nonsensical at all, but merely
funny or silly... As a sometime nonsense
writer, I remain happy with the present
confused and indulgent state of affairs… I
wouldn’t want my product denied the label just
for making too much sense (225).
This image that Richards promoted of herself as a
mother conveniently dovetailed with conventional views of
womanhood, and eventually dominated the way in which
her poems were received. Unlike Lear – a landscape
painter, who was never more than a guest in the nursery –
Richards has become associated with the nursery and with
real children. She was thus demoted from the category of
artist to the category of mother who composes verses (Russ
49). Evidently, the successful pairing of writing for
children with Richards’s high-profile motherhood, and with
her depiction of a happy childhood was so compelling that
the critics readily overlooked subversive or disturbing
elements in Richards’s poems. It seems that Richards’s
gender and her proximity to the nursery have unwittingly
determined her literary status more than the content and the
quality of her poems.
At the same time, this made nonsense a perfect
means of encryption. The label of nonsense (literally
understood) prevented readers from seriously prying into
her poetry, and enabled Richards greater freedom of
writing, more, at least, than she could afford to do in her
autobiographies. It is this kind of freedom that X. J.
Kennedy, a contemporary nonsense poet and critic,
describes when pointing at the confusion concerning
nonsense in the context of children's literature:
Whether consciously or not Richards took advantage
of exactly this confusion.
Autobiographical Nonsense
Richards created an impression of buoyancy and of ad lib
jingles while disguising acts of defiance and self-exposure.
In fact, many of Richards’s most famous poems give vent
to personal strains, private family predicaments, and
parental discontents. Some of Richards’s most celebrated
poems seem to reverberate with childhood occurrences that
are described in her autobiographies and put the latter in a
new light. As a child, Richards occasionally lived in the
Perkins Institute for the Blind, run by her father. It was “a
rather breathless sort of life, I seem to think, never exactly
taking root” she recalls in her second autobiography (SW
13). Although Richards does not speak ill of the time that
the family spent at Perkins, the language that she uses to
describe it conveys faint unease and a chaotic sense of
flux. According to Richards, only her eldest sister, Julia
Romana “was the one of us who fully entered into that life,
181
There Once Was a Lady Called Laura
their brother as “uncle”). While these poems convey more
than a slight sense of discomfort that grows as one re-reads
them, they have never aroused responses similar to the
attraction intertwined with objections, raised by somewhat
similar poems by Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter
(1845) or Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz (1865), for
example. Possibly, Richards’s public image as well as the
classification of her poems as nonsense is accountable for
this oversight.
A similar oversight concerns the content of a
number of poems that can be puzzling, if not disturbing,
for a patriotic American reader who identifies with
American values, such as autonomy, individualism, and
self-reliance. In Richards’s “A Legend of Lake
Okeefinokee” (TL 1-3), for example, a frog wants to
embark on a journey away from home but is failed by “a
bad mocking-bird” that eventually brings about his death:
[and] made her most intimate friends among the blind girls
of her own age” (SW 13). In a sentence that stands out and
forms a paragraph of its own Richards declares, or rather
protests: “For myself I can claim no such lovely
accomplishments” (SW 14). Living with the blind may
explain the prevalence of “eye poems” and “eye stories” in
Richards’s writing. One striking example is the shocking
description of little Maud, Richards’s youngest sister,
poking the eyes of a beautiful new doll after a visit to the
Institute (WIYA 34). Echoes of this episode can be found in
poems such as “Emily Jane” (TL 81-2) and in “A Nursery
Tragedy” (TL 165-66), where an elephant-toy expresses
extreme discomfort when facing another toy’s “goggling,
glassy glare:” “But more, oh, more than all, I hate/ Your
gleaming eyes of glass!” Although the scene in the poem is
the nursery and the main heroes are toys, expectations of
an idyllic interaction shatter in the face of violence.
Quite a few of Richards’s verses are menacing, and
their aggressive, even cruel, contents, though not new in
children’s literature, are incongruent with nineteenthcentury American notions of maternity. Death is ubiquitous
in rhymes that deal with animals, and the associative link
between animals and children (and women!) is enough to
render Richards’s entertaining poems thorny. Further
stressing the connection to children is the fact that the
animals that end up dead in these poems are usually young:
the three little chickens, one of the seven little tigers, one of
the five little monkeys (that relate to the crocodile that kills
There once was a frog,
And he lived in a bog,
On the banks of Lake Okeefinokee.
And the words of the song
That he sang all day long
Were, “Croakety croakety croaky.”
Said the frog, “I have found
That my life’s daily round
In this place is exceedingly poky.
So no longer I’ll stop,
But I swiftly will hop
182
Etti Gordon Ginzburg
Away from Lake Okeefinokee.”
To hear one of my race
A-warbling on top of an oaky;
But if frogs can climb trees,
I may still find some ease
On the banks of Lake Okeefinokee.”
So he climbed up the tree;
But alas! down fell he!
And his lovely green neck it was broke;
And the sad truth to say,
Never more did he stray
From the banks of Lake Okeefinokee.
Now a bad mocking-bird
By mischance overheard
The words of the frog as he spoke.
And he said, “All my life
Frog and I’ve been at strife,
As we lived by Lake Okeefinokee.
“Now I see at a glance
Here’s a capital chance
For to play him a capital jokee.
So I’ll venture to say
That he shall not to-day
Leave the banks of Lake Okeefinokee.”
And the bad mocking-bird
Said, “How very absurd
And delightful a practical jokee!”
But I’m happy to say
He was drowned the next day
In the waters of Okeefinokee.
So this bad mocking-bird,
Without saying a word,
He flew to a tree which was oaky,
And loudly he sang,
Till the whole forest rang,
“Oh! Croakety croakety croaky!”
Death thwarts the frog’s enterprise and reveals, if one
cares for a moral, a sad truism about the malevolent human
nature in the tradition of the fable. “The Three Little
Chickens Who Went Out to Tea, and the Elephant” (TL
115-17) is another example of a pointless cruel death that
finds the Little Chickens on a little journey:
As he warbled this song,
Master frog came along,
A-filling his pipe for to smokee;
And he said, “’T is some frog
Has escaped from the bog
Of Okeefinokee.
Elephant next began to dance:
Capered about with a stately prance
Learned from his grandmother over in France,
Cackle, wackle, wackle!
Fast and faster ’gan to tread,
“I am filled with amaze
183
There Once Was a Lady Called Laura
Trod on every chicken’s head,
Killed them all uncommonly dead,
Cackle, wackle, wackle!
Oh, tunk-a-tunk-a-tunk-a-tunk!
The poem seems to be about abstention from sex,
thus marriage, but that does not make it any less attractive
for children as the whole issue is cleverly sanitized under
the guise of misbehavior as well as under the melodious
spell of “tunk-a-tunk-a-tunk.” A similar unconventional fate
awaits the male protagonist of Richards’s delightful poem
“Antonio” (HOD 37). Whereas Antonio “[w]as tired of
living alonio,” the fair maid he courts seems to like her
independence more than her suitor and she refuses his offer
to marry her:
If heroic individualism and selfhood have always
been considered the cornerstones of American culture in the
best of Emersonian and Whitmanian tradition, then
Richards’s poems seem to convey a completely contrary
message: the distressing ending of “The Three Little
Chickens” would discourage any young person from going
on a quest.
Even when considering family values, a careful
reader may end up somewhat perplexed. In “A Spanish
Ballad” (TL 141-42) a charming veil of musicality conceals
a surprising ending where a woman vigorously shuns the
prospect of marriage; the woman refuses her suitor and he
becomes a monk and is destined to celibacy:
Antonio, Antonio,
Was tired of living alonio,
He thought he would woo
Miss Lissamy Loo
Miss Lissamy Lucy Molonio.
A GENTLEMAN in fair Madrid
He loved a lovely maid, he did;
Of all the maids the pearl and pink,
Oh, tink-a-tink-a-tink-a-tink!
Antonio, Antonio,
Rode off on his polo-polonio,
He found the fair maid
In a bowery shade,
A-sitting and knitting alonio.
He followed her both near and far,
Performing on his light guitar;
And often at her feet he sank,
Oh, tank-a-tank-a-tank-a-tank!
Antonio, Antonio,
Said, “If you will be my ownio,
I'll love you true
And I’ll buy for you,
An icery creamery conio!”
But she remained both grim and grave;
“I wish,” she said, “you would behave!”
And so he went and was a monk,
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Etti Gordon Ginzburg
Oh, nonio, Antonio!
You’re far too bleak and bonio!
And all that I wish,
You singular fish,
Is that you will quickly begonia.”
motherhood with tenderness and childhood with naiveté,
there was no other way in which the American Victorians
could classify Richards’s disturbing yet buoyant poems
except as nonsense if they were to accept her poetic
offerings.
Considering the status of Richards’s poems at the
onset of the twenty-first century, we seem to have inherited
the Victorian attitude toward Richards’s verses as no more
than “a sophisticated form of children’s literature” (Ede 2).
However, an attempt to read Richards’s poems in the wider
context of their writer’s life and times may reveal a
surprisingly original writer caught between the constraints
of her time, her roles as a daughter and a mother, and her
need to express what was then a threat to everything that
constituted her identity.
Antonio, Antonio,
He uttered a dismal moanio;
Then ran off and hid
(Or I’m told that he did)
In the Anticatarctical Zonio.
As in “A Spanish Ballad”, the female protagonist of
“Antonio” is very much in control of her life, while the
male is depicted (through her eyes) as meek and “bonio.”
Lucy Molonio is not afraid to refuse (and quite rudely so,
one must confess) a marriage offer, a courageous decision
considering the status of unmarried women at the end of
the nineteenth century. It appears that these appealing
would-be courting nursery rhymes concealed a subversive
trait that challenged conventional nineteenth-century
attitudes.
Works Cited
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Boas, George. The Cult of Childhood. Dallas, TX: Spring
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Cammaerts, Emile. The Poetry of Nonsense. London:
George Routledge and Sons, 1925. Print.
***
Richards must have struggled with the explosive content of
what she had to say, yet felt safe when she could say it in
the twilight zone of juvenile literature, and particularly
within the protected niche and under the silly veil of
nonsense. Apparently, at a time that associated
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There Once Was a Lady Called Laura
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