Nonsense Verse - Usage

Usage

There is a long tradition of nonsense verse in English. The Anglo-Saxon riddles are an early form. For instance:

A moth ate some words -- it seemed to me

strangely weird -- when I heard this wonder:

that it had devoured -- the song of a man.

A thief in the thickness of night -- gloriously mouthed

the source of knowledge -- but the thief was not

the least bit wiser -- for the words in his mouth.

The following poem makes even more extreme use of word incompatibility by pairing a number of polar opposites such as morning/night, paralyzed/walking, dry/drowned, lie/true, in conjunction with lesser incompatibilities such as swords/shot and rubber/wall.

One bright morning in the middle of the night,

Two dead boys got up to fight.

Back-to-back they faced one another,

Drew their swords and shot each other.

One was blind and the other couldn't see,

So they chose a dummy for a referee.

A blind man went to see fair play,

A dumb man went to shout "hooray!"

A deaf policeman heard the noise,

And came and killed those two dead boys.

A paralyzed donkey walking by,

Kicked the copper in the eye,

Sent him through a nine inch wall,

Into a dry ditch and drowned them all.

(If you don't believe this lie is true,

Ask the blind man -- he saw it too!)

A simpler variant of this is:

One fine day in the middle of the night.

Two dead men got up to fight.

back to back they faced each other,

Drew their swords and shot each other.

The deaf man heard it,

The blind man saw it

and the man with no legs ran to call an ambulance.

Many nursery rhymes are nonsense if the context and background are not known. Some claim that Mother Goose rhymes were originally written to parody the aristocracy while appearing to be nothing more than nonsense nursery rhymes. One example is:

Hey diddle, diddle,

The cat and the fiddle.

The cow jumped over the moon.

The little dog laughed to see such fun,

And the dish ran away with the spoon.