'A Whim, a Freak, a Capricious Notion"

I discovered Dover Publications in the mid-Sixties when my infatuation with chess was peaking. They specialized in inexpensive, out-of-copyright reprints, often photo-facsimiles of the original editions. Their catalogue was an adolescent’s delight, heavy with books about chess, codes and mathematical puzzles, and titles by Martin Gardner and E.A. Abbott (Flatland) – and Albert Einstein. One could acquire a comprehensive education reading only books published by Dover. I think of them as a STEM-heavy counterpart to the Modern Library, a gift to autodidacts. Dover editions of Santayana’s The Sense of Beauty, Moses Maimonides’ The Guide for the Perplexed and two volumes of Spinoza are still on my shelves.

In the library I happened on A Whimsey Anthology edited by Carolyn Wells (1862-1942), originally published in 1906 and reissued by Dover in 1963. The cover price: $1.25. Wells was an American poet who published more than 170 books, mostly mysteries and titles for children. In her brief preface she writes:

“A whimsey is defined by the dictionaries as a whim, a freak, a capricious notion, an odd device. Though of trifling values as literary efforts, verbal whimseys often display such ingenuity and patience of labor that they command, perforce, a certain admiration.”

She had me at “perforce.” Most of the poems she collects can be shoehorned into the light verse category. There’s an emphasis on Oulipo-style stunt poems – lipograms, anagrams, palindromes, acrostics and what Wells calls “typographical whimseys.” Included among the “catalogue whimseys” is "Similes” by the always prolific Anonymous, including these lines:

“As thin as a herring--as fat as a pig,

As proud as a peacock—as blithe as a grig;

As savage as tigers—as mild as a dove,

As stiff as a poker—as limp as a glove:

As blind as a bat—as deaf as a post,

As cool as a cucumber—as warm as a toast;

As flat as a flounder—as round as a ball,

As blunt as a hammer—as sharp as an awl.”

With time, even clichés grow obscure and require footnotes. The OED glosses grig as an eel; “a diminutive person, a dwarf”; “a short-legged hen”: and a grasshopper or cricket. None is notably blithe. But with an adjective such as “merry,” “lively” or “mad,” a grig is “an extravagantly lively person, one who is full of frolic and jest.” But who today knows a flounder is flat?

In Wells’ anthology we get not profundities but cleverness, and there is a place for that. Call it folk poetry. She taught me the meaning of a new word, “centone”: “a literary text or composition consisting of quotations or sections taken from other works.” Here are the first four lines of “Life,” each lifted from another poet:

“Why all this toil for triumphs of an hour?

Life’s a short summer, man a flower.

Be turns we catch the vital breath and die—

The cradle and the tomb, alas! so nigh.

To be, is better far than not to be.

Though all man’s life may seem a tragedy.”

And so on for thirty-eight lines. The authors of the lines quoted above are, respectively, Young, Johnson, Pope, Prior, George Sewell and Spenser. The anonymous poet’s ingenuity says something about the persistence of iambic pentameter and mortality as a theme in English poetry. Finally, Wells includes in her “Mnemonics” chapter a poem she calls “Sheridan’s Calendar” and attributes to Anonymous. In fact, it was written by the playwright and satirist Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816):

“January snowy,     

February flowy,       

March blowy,           

“April show’ry,        

May flow’ry,

June bow’ry,

“July moppy,

August croppy,         

September poppy,    

“October breezy,

November wheezy, 

December freezy.”