Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

If we look behind the mask of Comedy, we will find the face of Tragedy. Laughter may be humanity’s greatest survival skill, a potent weapon against despair and the Unfairness of Life.

Today, people in “industrialized nations” take it for granted that children will outlive their parents, and call it a tragedy when they don’t. We seldom think about the rest of the world, or about the whole world before the 20th century — all the people who would consider a family extremely fortunate if only half their children died before the age of five.

Edward Lear (1812–1888) was the twentieth of twenty-one pregnancies endured by his mother Ann Skerrett Lear, wife of Jeremiah Lear, a stockbroker. He was their youngest child to survive. There had already been several infant deaths, and his health was delicate: his eyesight was poor, and he suffered from chronic respiratory ailments. His parents waited three years before arranging for Edward to be baptized.

Then his father’s financial reverses forced the family to rent out their home, and Edward was sent to live with his eldest sister, twenty-five-year-old Ann. But when financial stability returned, his mother left him in his sister’s care. Ann never married, devoting herself to her brother as long as she lived, but he never forgot the hurt of his mother’s rejection.

At the age of five he had his first epileptic seizure. Lear called this his “Demon.” He was so ashamed of the affliction that he would go to great lengths to hide it, even from people who had real affection for him.

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But the child Edward was “tenacious of life” as Charlotte Brontë put it, and grew into adulthood. Here is a poem in which Lear satirizes his adult self, with a bird-like caricature he drew of himself with his cat Foss:

How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear

How pleasant to know Mr. Lear,
Who has written such volumes of stuff.
Some think him ill-tempered and queer,
But a few find him pleasant enough.

His mind is concrete and fastidious,
His nose is remarkably big;
His visage is more or less hideous,
His beard it resembles a wig.

He has ears, and two eyes, and ten fingers,
(Leastways if you reckon two thumbs);
He used to be one of the singers,
But now he is one of the dumbs.

He sits in a beautiful parlour,
With hundreds of books on the wall;
He drinks a great deal of marsala,
But never gets tipsy at all.

He has many friends, laymen and clerical,
Old Foss is the name of his cat;
His body is perfectly spherical,
He weareth a runcible hat.

When he walks in waterproof white,
The children run after him so!
Calling out, “He’s gone out in his night-
Gown, that crazy old Englishman, oh!”

He weeps by the side of the ocean,
He weeps on the top of the hill;
He purchases pancakes and lotion,
And chocolate shrimps from the mill.

He reads, but he does not speak, Spanish,
He cannot abide ginger beer;
Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish,
How pleasant to know Mr. Lear!

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