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Disorganised desire to live Before it’s time to die. This is the so-called ‘common metre’ widely deployed in hymns and ballads, the forms that bring together two of Peake’s strongest influences: his childhood among missionaries in China and his fascination with the sea. (Given their origin in song, it is not surprising that his nonsense verse should have been set to music by several composers.) Peake knew dozens of hymns and was always singing them, a habit he shares with the protagonist of his novel Mr Pye (1953). This tells the story of a self-appointed missionary who brings the good news of his own peculiar deity, the ‘Great Pal’, to the tiny island of Sark in the English Channel. Mr Pye has a special fondness for three hymns written partly in the ‘common metre’: ‘Dare to Be a Daniel’, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ and ‘Who Would True Valour See’, and he eventually recites a nonsense poem of his own in the same metre, one of several he once wrote, he tells us, during dull board meetings ‘while others doodled’. For Mr Pye, such compositions are ideally suited to times when one feels powerless and tongue-tied. He recites his verses to a small group of friends at a point when he is locked in a solitary struggle between the saintly and diabolic aspects of his personality – when wings and horns keep sprouting from his body, betokening an inward combat whose outcome neither he nor anyone else seems able to influence. ‘Words at such times,’ he says, ‘make little sense and what sense they do make is nonsense.’ The poem he declaims, ‘O’er Seas that Have No Beaches’ (p. 167 in this edition) is, despite its absurdity, an astonishingly eloquent evocation of loneliness, a lament for a naturally buoyant soul adrift on a shoreless ocean without hope of rescue. It is also a song about the sea, and its subject, as well as its form, connects it with the ballad tradition, which is rich in maritime narratives, from ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ to ‘The House Carpenter’ – to say nothing of The Ancient Mariner, which Peake illustrated in 1943. The logic of ballads is akin to that of nonsense, with its perpetual shying away from explanations based on conventional notions of cause and effect, and its sudden unheralded obtrusions of the fantastic into the everyday. Peake’s fascination with the sea was evident in his lifelong devotion to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which he also illustrated in the 1940s and could recite by heart as a boy. The sea keeps breaking into his nonsense verse, from the waters that implicitly fill the poet’s brain in ‘About 6
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My Ebb- and Flow-ziness’ (p. 42), and the hake-filled ocean where ‘The Frivolous Cake’ flees the unwanted attentions of a lustful knife (pp. 44–5), to the breakers that crash on the rhubarb-covered shoreline of ‘White Mules at Prayer’ (pp. 124–6), or the ‘sneezing sea’ to which the melancholy wanderers stray in ‘Sensitive, Seldom and Sad’ (p. 106). As Lear and Carroll knew – think of ‘The Owl and the Pussy Cat’ or the Mock Turtle – the vast pathlessness of the ocean is the perfect medium for nonsense, permitting the imagination to unmoor itself and drift at the behest of the little verbal breezes that fill its sails. But Peake’s oceans are always invading the space of the domestic, carrying off random items of furniture or offering a welcome escape-route from household crises and abortive romances. Just as the sea-adventure Treasure Island can be found on the shelves of the most landlocked family household, so a whale finds its way onto a mantelpiece in ‘It Makes a Change’ (p. 88). A table of ‘rare design’ transports a husband and wife round an unknown archipelago in ‘All Over the Lilac Brine!’ (p. 78), a sofa finds itself afloat in ‘O’er Seas that Have No Beaches’, and a disappointed lover swims to the Arctic in ‘Mine Was the One’ (p. 65), where he is joined by one of the outraged brothers of ‘The Ballad of Sweet Pighead’, who flees to the Arctic floes to escape the disgrace of a literally pigheaded sister (p. 116). In Peake’s nonsense, the cross-fertilization of the domestic setting where hymns are sung and the unstable decks to which salt-water ballads pay tribute testifies to the ineffable strangeness of families, whether these consist of childless couples or extended circles thronged with more or less distant relatives, flung into the same boat, so to speak, by the haphazard circumstances of kinship by blood or marriage. You can choose your friends, the saying goes, but not your relatives – or even your lovers – and Peake’s characters are constantly being surprised by their bizarre connections, whether with uncles, sisters, children, aunts or spouses. Uncles and aunts are especially wayward family members in Peake’s universe. From the irrepressible Uncle Paul who plays the piano to his cats in ‘My Uncle Paul of Pimlico’ (p. 86) to the ancient aunts ‘who live on sphagnum moss’ in ‘Crown Me with Hairpins’ (p. 220), the siblings of one’s parents in the nonsense verse seem helplessly in thrall to their strange addictions. The most famous of Peake’s verses that take families as their subject – ‘Aunts and Uncles’ (pp. 150–3) – sees a succession of the titular relatives transformed into what they are obsessed by or compared with, finding the range of available 7

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Disorganised desire to live Before it’s time to die.

This is the so-called ‘common metre’ widely deployed in hymns and ballads, the forms that bring together two of Peake’s strongest influences: his childhood among missionaries in China and his fascination with the sea. (Given their origin in song, it is not surprising that his nonsense verse should have been set to music by several composers.) Peake knew dozens of hymns and was always singing them, a habit he shares with the protagonist of his novel Mr Pye (1953). This tells the story of a self-appointed missionary who brings the good news of his own peculiar deity, the ‘Great Pal’, to the tiny island of Sark in the English Channel. Mr Pye has a special fondness for three hymns written partly in the ‘common metre’: ‘Dare to Be a Daniel’, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ and ‘Who Would True Valour See’, and he eventually recites a nonsense poem of his own in the same metre, one of several he once wrote, he tells us, during dull board meetings ‘while others doodled’. For Mr Pye, such compositions are ideally suited to times when one feels powerless and tongue-tied. He recites his verses to a small group of friends at a point when he is locked in a solitary struggle between the saintly and diabolic aspects of his personality – when wings and horns keep sprouting from his body, betokening an inward combat whose outcome neither he nor anyone else seems able to influence. ‘Words at such times,’ he says, ‘make little sense and what sense they do make is nonsense.’ The poem he declaims, ‘O’er Seas that Have No Beaches’ (p. 167 in this edition) is, despite its absurdity, an astonishingly eloquent evocation of loneliness, a lament for a naturally buoyant soul adrift on a shoreless ocean without hope of rescue.

It is also a song about the sea, and its subject, as well as its form, connects it with the ballad tradition, which is rich in maritime narratives, from ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ to ‘The House Carpenter’ – to say nothing of The Ancient Mariner, which Peake illustrated in 1943. The logic of ballads is akin to that of nonsense, with its perpetual shying away from explanations based on conventional notions of cause and effect, and its sudden unheralded obtrusions of the fantastic into the everyday. Peake’s fascination with the sea was evident in his lifelong devotion to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, which he also illustrated in the 1940s and could recite by heart as a boy. The sea keeps breaking into his nonsense verse, from the waters that implicitly fill the poet’s brain in ‘About

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