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options for action severely curtailed by their transformations. Aunty Grace, turned into a flatfish, ‘all but vanished’ when seen from the side; Uncle Wog, trapped in canine form, hides himself for shame – and starts hiding bones, too, compulsively; Aunty Vi, changed to an insect, is mercilessly battered by (of all people) her favourite nephew. (One wonders if he had always taken advantage of her favouritism to metaphorically batter her.) These presumably unmarried and childless family members (at least, one seldom hears of spouses or offspring in connection with these aunts and uncles) have become defined by the things their nephews and nieces say about them, locked into the limited frame of reference provided by teasing, rumour and gossip; and most of them seem either indifferent to or positively delighted by the fantastic metamorphoses to which they have been subjected. ‘Aunts and Uncles’ illustrates one of the ways in which Peake’s nonsense steers its wayward course. A string of similes or metaphors, some familiar, some unexpected, is given corporeal form in the aunts and uncles of the title, and clichés are thereby brought alive, made endlessly fruitful, so that one can imagine the series of relatives and of stanzas extending indefinitely, so jaunty is the rhythm of the poem, so amusing the antics of its cast. Some of the questions to which the series seems to respond are these: when you call your aunt a pig, snake, cold fish, or insect, what are you doing to her, and how might she react to being so labelled? If she took the comparison to heart, or became what you called her, how might she adapt her domestic arrangements to the needs of her new identity? There’s an impeccable logic to each relative’s response to his or her transformation, as there is to the reactions of Gregor Samsa’s family to his transformation into a beetle in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Unlike Gregor, these eccentrics and their families take each outlandish situation in their stride, though, recognizing perhaps that the quirks of language ensure we all inhabit a universe full of incongruities and inexplicable changes, to which we adapt ourselves every second of our lives without noticing our own versatility. Conversations offer constant examples of this versatility, as we respond from moment to moment to the misunderstandings that bedevil our efforts at communication. Many of Peake’s most elaborate nonsense verses take the form of dialogues at cross purposes, from the fatal exchange between the tigerish ‘confidential stranger’ and his victim in ‘Come, Sit Beside Me Dear, He Said’ (pp. 60–1) to the inconclusive chat between a singing giraffe and a 8
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woman in ‘Deliria’ (pp. 63–4), or the squabble between husband and wife in ‘Come Husband! Come, and Ply the Trade’ (pp. 69–71). The wandering paths taken by these dialogues are lent their mazy complexity by the failure of either party to fathom the desires or intentions of his or her interlocutor; a failure that finds its most vivid expression in the heroine’s terror of Figures of Speech in ‘It Worries Me to Know’ (pp. 161–5). Locutions such as ‘You have blood on your hands’ haunt this heroine like vengeful ghosts, recalling for her some unspecified ‘crime / I did when I was three’ and hampering her efforts to articulate her fears to the ‘wise and cloudy man’ who seeks to advise her. For her, Figures of Speech are malignant things, prone to ambushing their users – as happens when the old man leaves her to ‘hold the floor’ at the end of the poem, which gives her blisters on both hands from gripping the parquet. In the end the heroine retreats to pastoral seclusion, although even here the mooing of cows leads her to speculate about their inward life. The Figures of Speech have been too vigorously suggestive for her, driving her to take flight from conversation altogether, like many of the protagonists of Peake’s narratives in prose and verse. Their dangerous vitality is gloriously captured in the series of drawings Peake produced for a book, Figures of Speech, in 1954, which we have used as illustrations in this edition, because of their obvious affinity with ‘It Worries Me to Know’, and because they are the visual counterpart to Peake’s habit of literalizing metaphor in his poetry and prose. In Peake’s nonsense, similes and Figures of Speech unspool threads of ideas or images that develop into elaborate stories or quasi-dramatic exchanges; and threads themselves are one of the many repeated themes that run through his nonsense verse. ‘The Threads of Thought Are Not for Me’ (p. 68) contains no thread of thought linking its stanzas except the thought of thread itself – the cotton twine of the first stanza, the needlework of the saddle in the third, the trailing clew in the last – as if to demonstrate the capacity of the human mind to stitch things together quite independently of the causes and effects privileged in formal discourse. Threads also put in an appearance in ‘The Threads Remain’ (p. 123) and ‘Squat Ursula’ (pp. 138–9). Other obsessions are malicious bowler hats that threaten to enslave their owners (‘Ode to a Bowler’ (p. 30), ‘Tintinnabulum’ (pp. 128–37), ‘The Men in Bowler Hats Are Sweet’ (p. 148)); roots (‘Ancient Root O Ancient Root’ (p. 44), ‘The Hideous Root’ (pp. 140–4), ‘Undertakers’ Song 1’ (p. 181)); horses (‘I Married Her in Green’ (p. 50), ‘The Threads of Thought’ (p. 68), 9

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options for action severely curtailed by their transformations. Aunty Grace, turned into a flatfish, ‘all but vanished’ when seen from the side; Uncle Wog, trapped in canine form, hides himself for shame – and starts hiding bones, too, compulsively; Aunty Vi, changed to an insect, is mercilessly battered by (of all people) her favourite nephew. (One wonders if he had always taken advantage of her favouritism to metaphorically batter her.) These presumably unmarried and childless family members (at least, one seldom hears of spouses or offspring in connection with these aunts and uncles) have become defined by the things their nephews and nieces say about them, locked into the limited frame of reference provided by teasing, rumour and gossip; and most of them seem either indifferent to or positively delighted by the fantastic metamorphoses to which they have been subjected.

‘Aunts and Uncles’ illustrates one of the ways in which Peake’s nonsense steers its wayward course. A string of similes or metaphors, some familiar, some unexpected, is given corporeal form in the aunts and uncles of the title, and clichés are thereby brought alive, made endlessly fruitful, so that one can imagine the series of relatives and of stanzas extending indefinitely, so jaunty is the rhythm of the poem, so amusing the antics of its cast. Some of the questions to which the series seems to respond are these: when you call your aunt a pig, snake, cold fish, or insect, what are you doing to her, and how might she react to being so labelled? If she took the comparison to heart, or became what you called her, how might she adapt her domestic arrangements to the needs of her new identity? There’s an impeccable logic to each relative’s response to his or her transformation, as there is to the reactions of Gregor Samsa’s family to his transformation into a beetle in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Unlike Gregor, these eccentrics and their families take each outlandish situation in their stride, though, recognizing perhaps that the quirks of language ensure we all inhabit a universe full of incongruities and inexplicable changes, to which we adapt ourselves every second of our lives without noticing our own versatility.

Conversations offer constant examples of this versatility, as we respond from moment to moment to the misunderstandings that bedevil our efforts at communication. Many of Peake’s most elaborate nonsense verses take the form of dialogues at cross purposes, from the fatal exchange between the tigerish ‘confidential stranger’ and his victim in ‘Come, Sit Beside Me Dear, He Said’ (pp. 60–1) to the inconclusive chat between a singing giraffe and a

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