Tea at Trianon: Why Does Tom Bombadil Sing Nonsense?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, September 24, 2024

Why Does Tom Bombadil Sing Nonsense?

From The New Albion:

We’ve grown to love nonsense poetry in our house. Lewis Caroll, Ogden Nash, and plenty of Edward Lear. Nonsense is a wonderful place to introduce poetry to children; not because it is silly, but because good nonsense poetry is about sheer joy in language, in the words themselves, their jump and jangle. This is true of all poetry of course—poetry is language under pressure. But it is particularly true of nonsense poetry. A poorly chosen phrase can make a poem fall flat, but if it’s a nonsense poem it falls even flatter. Lewis Caroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” shouldn’t work, and yet it does, because Carroll brings all these absurd, dissonant words into an accord that, somehow, he discerned in the ether.

I will confess that, sometimes (and only sometimes, and only very, very briefly) in our snatches of after dinner nonsense, I feel like one of Plato’s imagined philosopher-kings. In Plato’s Republic, the philosopher-kings are afforded leisure—scholē in the Greek, the root for “school” and “scholar”, if you can believe it. Leisure isn’t idleness. Rather, it’s the time and space to contemplate, to develop wisdom, and to consider things in themselves. Leisure is a date with Reality, a chance to be romanced by Lady Wisdom.

In fact, more than feeling like a philosopher-king, I feel… Bombadilish. (Read more.)