A Reflection On Nine Nonsense Poems

The Lamentable Tale of Wiggles McSprout

In the town of Thrumble-on-Wee,

Lived a chap named Wiggles McSprout.

He danced on a fence with a teaspoon and pence,

Till the Mayor declared him a lout.

"A lout?!" cried Wiggles, indignant and stout,

"I'll wager my socks on my name!

For a teaspoon and pence are entirely immense

When you balance them both on a flame!"

Yet flame was a toad, and the toad was a lord,

Who governed the Kingdom of Sporks.

With a croak and a hop, he declared from his slop,

“That Wiggles must dance with the storks!”

So the storks were assembled, all jangly and tall,

With noses like spoons full of jam.

They whistled in Dutch, but alas, not too much,

For whistling’s forbidden in flam.

Then Wiggles declared, with a flourish and glare,

"I shan't be cajoled by a frog!

For toads are too round, and their feet touch the ground,

Whereas mine are up here on this log!"

The toad was astounded! The storks quite confounded!

The Mayor just chewed on his hat.

But Wiggles, so fleet, simply spun on his feet,

And vanished—a whisk in the flat.

So heed well this tale of McSprout and his pence,

Of teaspoons and fences and frogs.

For nonsense, dear friend, is a marvelous lens

Through which to see sense in the fog.

---

The Woeful Fates of Quentin Thrum

Quentin Thrum, of the Dithering Drum,

Had terribly flexible knees.

He wobbled and swayed,

And frequently prayed

That he wouldn’t be blown by the breeze.

One day at the fair, while combing his hair,

A parsnip accused him of crime.

"Theft of a hat!"

Quoth the vegetable flat,

"An insult most vile and sublime!"

Before he could run, the trial was done,

A gibbon presided in haste.

The jury (some bees)

Convicted with ease—

"You must be encased in a paste!"

"Oh no!" Quentin cried, "I'll surely be fried!"

And the gibbon said, "That is the rule.

The pasting comes first,

But then, at the worst,

You’ll be lightly sautéed in a pool."

Yet just as they smeared, a wizard appeared—

A wizard called Wumplet the Wise.

"Behold!" Wumplet yelled,

And suddenly spelled

The paste into twenty-three pies.

The parsnip withdrew (as parsnips oft do),

The gibbon was lost in regret.

And Quentin, elated,

Politely berated

The bees for their lack of respect.

Thus ends the tale of Quentin Thrum,

Who never was sautéed.

But take this thought—

If accused by a swede,

Ensure your alibi’s made.

---

The Melancholy of Professor Puddlewick

Professor Puddlewick was a learned old goat,

With spectacles perched on his billowing coat.

He studied the sciences—time, space, and cheese,

And wrote lengthy treatises read by the fleas.

One day, while attempting to measure the fog,

He slipped on a particularly loquacious frog.

It bellowed, “Good sir, that was quite uncouth!”

And handed the Professor a wobbly tooth.

Confused but intrigued, he took it with glee,

And placed it in brine to examine at tea.

But lo! As he stirred, the tooth gave a yawn,

Then sprouted two legs and a bonnet half-drawn.

It danced on his biscuits, it whistled a tune,

It scribbled equations concerning the moon.

“I fear I’ve discovered a terrible plight—

For teeth should not waltz or recite poems at night!”

He rushed to the Dean with a bucket of woes,

Who sniffed and replied, “That’s how science goes.

Last week my own spectacles turned into bees.

They set up a hive in the faculty trees.”

So Puddlewick sighed and returned to his books,

Ignoring the tooth as it tap-danced on hooks.

He learned that in science, one mustn’t despair—

For sometimes, one’s theories grow legs and grow hair.

---

The Lament of Gormly Frounce

In the dank little town of Moribund Mire,

Where the chimneys lean like men set afire,

Lived Gormly Frounce with his weevilly stare,

And toes that would twitch when he felt despair.

His house was a tower of spindles and bones,

Where the rats played chess on the withering stones.

His hat was a ruin of moth-bitten felt,

And he smelled of old rhubarb and sorrow half-melt.

One night as he counted his freckles anew,

A whisper arose from the chimney’s black flue:

"Gormly, O Gormly, beware of the fog—

It carries the whispers of misanthrope dogs."

He quivered, he shivered, he gnawed at his sleeve,

For he knew what the dogs did to those who believe.

They would gobble your laughter, they’d nibble your spine,

Then prance through the streets with your dreams in a line.

So Gormly stayed up with a candle and spoon,

And hummed to the rats a lugubrious tune,

But the fog rolled in with a spine-chilling moan…

And Gormly Frounce was never quite known.

They say if you listen when midnight is thin,

You’ll hear his hat sigh in the whispering wind.

---

The Misfortune of Grimble Toadley

In a tower of brambles and worm-bitten bricks,

Where the ceilings hung low with the breath of the sick,

Lived Grimble Toadley, a sorrowful lump,

With fingers like candles half-melted to stumps.

His spine was a question, his eyelids were thin,

His ears like old gloves, far too wrinkled to grin.

His coat smelled of turnips, his cravat of regret,

And his boots were composed of an unspoken debt.

One evening at dusk, as he counted his toes,

A knock at the door made the floorboards decompose.

It creaked like a whisper that slithered and spat—

Yet none stood beyond but the wind and a rat.

Then came a muttering, dry as a moth,

A voice like dead parchment unwinding its cloth:

“Grimble, O Grimble, your shadow has fled,

And left you alone with the weight of your head.”

He turned to the mirror—oh, what did he see?

No shadow behind him, no ghostly decree.

Just a vacancy, hollow, a terrible hush,

Like a feast left to rot in the gloom of a slush.

The walls softly murmured, the candles turned grey,

And the rat licked its lips in a satisfied way.

For Grimble had woken too late from his dream—

And found he was nothing but dust in a seam.

They say if you whisper his name in the night,

The moths in your curtains will shudder in fright.

---

The Lament of Dr. Chokeweed

Dr. Chokeweed, grim of spleen,

Lived behind a velvet screen.

His windows wept, his floorboards sighed,

His chimney choked on something fried.

His smile was stitched from withered worms,

His shoes were built on legal terms.

His breakfast? Dust, with hints of coal.

His supper? Pickled lack-of-soul.

Yet deep within his sallow mind,

A single wish lay unrefined:

To knit a beast from wax and woe,

And teach it songs it shouldn't know.

He stitched its teeth from yellowed scrim,

Its eyes were stolen, dim by dim.

Its heart was oozed from attic walls,

Its voice was built from funeral calls.

At last it stirred, a ghastly thing,

It hiccupped once—then tried to sing.

Its tune unspooled like rotting twine,

A dirge of clocks that lost their time.

Dr. Chokeweed clapped with glee—

At last, at last, his symphony!

But walls caved in, the dust grew thick,

His fingers shrank to brittle sticks.

The beast kept singing, louder still,

The air grew sharp, the lamps stood still.

And when, at last, the tune was done,

Dr. Chokeweed was—simply—gone.

No one knows where he has fled,

But something hums beneath the bed.

---

The Lament of Lord Laggardly

Lord Laggardly lived in a lampshade of lead,

With tendrils of fungus that curled from his head.

His fingers were brittle, like whispering bone,

And his shadow would wander the hallways alone.

His meals were composed of regrettable things—

The dust of dead beetles, the eyelash of kings,

The rind of a whisper, the crust of a sigh,

And a broth brewed from echoes that wished they could die.

The night he was taken, the clocks all turned blue,

The owls grew gibbous and rattled the yew.

A chime with no origin rang in the air—

But nobody found him. For nobody dared.

Some say he still lingers, as quiet as moss,

A stain on the stonework, a tatter of loss.

So if, in the dark, you should hear something creak—

It’s just Lord Laggardly, learning to speak.

---

Miss Harrowbone’s Tea Party

Miss Harrowbone lived in a house of regret,
With curtains of whispers and carpets of debt.
Her parlour was draped in a sorrowful lace,
And shadows grew fingers to pat her pale face.

She hosted a tea for the finest of guests—
A gathering famed for its curious pests.
The Widow McCrack, who had drowned in her frown,
Brought silverfish scones from the heart of the town.

The Colonel arrived with a cough and a creak,
His spine full of splinters, his teacup a beak.
A governess came who was terribly dead,
Her laughter unspooling like yarn from her head.

They sipped at their cups full of echo and air,
They nibbled on wafers of brittle despair.
The biscuits dissolved into murmurs and sighs,
And laughter was something that curdled and died.

Miss Harrowbone smiled with her porcelain teeth,
Her tongue coiled up like a serpent beneath.
She poured out more tea that was cold as the grave,
And every last guest found it frightfully brave.

At midnight the chairs sighed and staggered away,
The walls stretched their ears for the gossip’s decay.
And Miss Harrowbone, in the gloom of her hall,
Danced with the echoes and nothing at all.

---

The Man Who Borrowed Faces

In alleyway murk and the dimmest of places,
Lurks the old man who keeps borrowing faces.
Not for the vanity, nor for the style—
But simply to wear them a little while.

He slips on a smile from a dandy at dawn,
By dusk it is ragged, the corners all torn.
A scholar’s pale frown he will fasten in place,
Until it grows heavy and slides off his face.

He plucks from the weary, the lost and alone,
A visage still warm, but no longer their own.
A bishop’s stern glower, a butler’s blank stare,
A mask from a harlot still scented with prayer.

Yet something is missing, it gnaws at his core—
The scraps do not fit him, they leave him quite sore.
For deep in the place where a face ought to be,
There’s only a hole full of dim memory.

And so he keeps borrowing, swiping and stealing,
A thief of expressions, a burglar of feeling.
But none of them linger, they slip and they slide—
For nothing can cling to the hollow inside.

---

Reflecting on this first set of nonsense poems, a certain flavour emerges—a curious mingling of the absurd, the grotesque, and the eerily melancholic. The figures who populate these verses are not simply eccentric; they are creatures of existential instability, forever teetering on the brink of reality, logic, and, in many cases, their own vanishing.

One immediate thematic thread is the inevitability of transformation and dissolution. Wiggles McSprout simply vanishes with a whisk; Gormly Frounce is swallowed by the fog; Lord Laggardly learns to speak, but only after becoming a spectral stain; the man who borrows faces is left with nothing but a gnawing emptiness. These figures are subject to forces beyond their control, not just in the physical sense, but in the fundamental nature of their being. They are consumed, altered, or undone by the nonsense logic of their worlds, much as characters in Lewis Carroll’s or Edward Lear’s works are bound by the self-contained absurdities of theirs.

Yet there is an undeniable playfulness in these annihilations. If one is to be consumed by fog or sentenced to paste, it is at least done with theatrical flourish. There is something of the carnivalesque here—a revelry in misfortune, a grotesque humour in decay. Dr. Chokeweed’s terrible creation does not rampage but sings, serenading him into nonexistence. Quentin Thrum escapes execution not through wit, but through the whimsical interference of Wumplet the Wise, whose logic is no less baffling than the crime of hat-theft levelled against Quentin in the first place. These figures are not merely suffering; they are part of a performance where nonsense is the supreme law.

A striking feature of this nonsense world is its materiality. It is not merely that the characters are undone, but that their worlds are composed of the kind of ephemeral and shifting substances that make dissolution inevitable. Wiggles McSprout balances a teaspoon and pence on a flame that is also a toad. Lord Laggardly’s meals consist of regret and echoes. Miss Harrowbone’s tea is poured from an atmosphere of despair, and the biscuits themselves dissolve into murmurs. Matter is never stable; it is infused with mood, meaning, and a certain theatrical whimsy, always ready to betray the assumptions of the physical world.

These characteristics align these poems with the great nonsense tradition. Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll may be the most obvious forebears, but there are shades here, too, of the more ominous absurdity found in Mervyn Peake’s work, where humour and horror are inextricably linked. The grotesqueries that unfurl through the verses call to mind Lear’s more tragic figures—the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò, doomed by his social absurdity, or the Dong with the Luminous Nose, wandering eternally in his singularity. But unlike Lear’s figures, whose sorrow is often solitary and unremarked upon, these characters meet their fates in a world that is itself complicit in their undoing.

There is, too, a deeper philosophical absurdity at play. Beneath the grotesque and the comical lies an undeniable existential uncertainty. What does it mean to be made of regrets, of sighs, of echoes? What happens when one’s shadow abandons them, or one’s identity is made up of stolen expressions that refuse to adhere? These are the questions lurking beneath the humour, giving the nonsense an edge of unease.

Ultimately, these poems revel in the great absurdist tradition: they delight in their own internal illogic, in the slipperiness of identity, and in the fragile, permeable boundaries between self and world. They are the kind of nonsense that does not merely amuse, but unsettles, raising the stakes of the ridiculous until the ridiculous itself becomes a kind of inevitable, albeit bewildering, fate. And therein lies the joy of nonsense at its finest: in its ability to unmoor us from reality, to cast us adrift in a world where the only rule is that nothing, ultimately, can be held in place for long.