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‘The Osseous ’Orse’ (p. 154), ‘Come, Break the News to Me, Sweet Horse!’ (pp. 200–1)), and a menagerie of other animals. These thematic threads bind the nonsense verse together much as references to Jubjub birds and the Chankly Bore bind together the nonsense verse of Carroll and Lear. What makes Peake’s verse distinctive, however, is his tendency to return to the same nonsense poem or sequence of lines over many years, pursuing the imaginative possibilities it throws out in different directions each time he revisits it. For this reason we found ourselves, in this edition, printing rival versions of a number of poems because there seemed no reason to give one version precedence over another. ‘Simple, Seldom and Sad’ (p. 47) and ‘Sensitive, Seldom and Sad’ (p. 106) were clearly regarded by Peake as different poems, since he printed the latter in Rhymes Without Reason (1944) and the former two years later in Titus Groan (1946), despite having (apparently) written it first. ‘Deliria’ (pp. 63–4) is a different poem from ‘The Camel’ (p. 96); both versions of ‘How Good It Is to Be Alone’ (pp. 71–3) and of ‘The Sunlight Lies upon the Fields’ / ‘The Sunlight Falls Upon the Grass’ (pp. 64 and 80) have something distinctive to recommend them; and ‘I Must Begin to Comprehend’ (p. 122) and ‘The Threads Remain’ (p. 123) has each its own atmosphere, despite the number of lines they have in common. The lines ‘Half tragical, half magical, / And half an hour, or two’ occur in both of the latter poems as well as in ‘What a Day It’s Been!’ (p. 90), which Peake published in Rhymes without Reason three years or so before inscribing ‘The Threads Remain’ in his 1947 notebook. Each pair of poems or duplicated lines, whether placed side by side in this edition or separated by several pages, gives us the pleasure of noting the different sorts of ‘nowhere’ to which nonsense can lead us from the same starting point – or how it can lead us to the same ‘nowhere’ from different points of origin. The journeys of nonsense extend over time as well as space, and are thus interwoven with the personal history of writers and readers as inseparably as the poems in this book are interwoven with the calamitous events of the Second World War and its aftermath. Unlike the serious poems, Peake’s nonsense verse makes no reference to contemporary historical events – with the notable exception of the fragment ‘Thank God for a Tadpole’ (p. 42), which is carefully dated 28 August 1939 (and is not exactly nonsense). It could be said, though, that this very rejection of its times by the nonsense verse is a kind of engagement with them. Many of the poems here concern themselves with resistance to entrapment: 10
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whether successful, as when the protagonist of ‘Tintinnabulum’ casts aside his soul-destroying bowler, or when Sweet Pighead decides to defy popular prejudice against her appearance with ‘unflinching courage’; or unsuccessful, as when the ‘healthy, happy man’ Footfruit is converted to dismal conformity with the ‘civilization’ of capitalism, and reduced to wretched ill-health in the process. Peake’s nonsense, like the other products of his imagination, is an act of defiance against the violence of war, the market forces that made his existence as an artist so tenuous, and the affectations and double standards of middle-class life, with which he seems to have had a love–hate relationship not unlike the feeling Titus has for the stifling ritual of Gormenghast castle in Peake’s most celebrated works, the Titus novels. This brings us to what is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the nonsense verse: its affinity with the adventures of Titus Groan. Nonsense verse is the poetry of Gormenghast – the massive, selfsufficient fortress which stands at the heart of the Titus novels, and which casts its shadow over the hero of the sequence long after he has shaken its dust from his feet and set out for the wilderness of factories, parties, zoos and homeless shelters that lies beyond. It’s nonsense verse that Titus’s sister Fuchsia reads in her secret attic hideaway, taking refuge in its triumphant non-compliance with the unbending ritual that governs her life as a daughter of the House of Groan. It’s nonsense verse that Titus’s father, Lord Sepulchrave, spouts when his library is burned to the ground by the upstart Steerpike, an atrocity that drives the book-loving Earl to madness and death. It’s nonsense verse that the Castle Poet intones when he pokes his head out unexpectedly from one of the windows of the ancient fastness, like an animated fragment of its architecture. Later, in the third of the Titus books, in which the young protagonist escapes from the castle and finds himself wandering a landscape full of capitalists, self-servers, vagrants and rebels, every part of his new environment seems to possess its own peculiar brand of nonsense poetry. The Titus books could in fact be described as an extended meditation on nonsense and the unique perspective on the world it lends us – the many uses to which it may be put, as various as the uses to which surrealism and other avant-garde forms were being co-opted in the artistic milieu of the 1940s and 1950s. Just how central nonsense verse is to the castle is made clear at the end of Gormenghast when the Castle Poet takes on the role of Master of Ritual: custodian, that is, of the giant books that contain 11

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‘The Osseous ’Orse’ (p. 154), ‘Come, Break the News to Me, Sweet Horse!’ (pp. 200–1)), and a menagerie of other animals. These thematic threads bind the nonsense verse together much as references to Jubjub birds and the Chankly Bore bind together the nonsense verse of Carroll and Lear. What makes Peake’s verse distinctive, however, is his tendency to return to the same nonsense poem or sequence of lines over many years, pursuing the imaginative possibilities it throws out in different directions each time he revisits it. For this reason we found ourselves, in this edition, printing rival versions of a number of poems because there seemed no reason to give one version precedence over another. ‘Simple, Seldom and Sad’ (p. 47) and ‘Sensitive, Seldom and Sad’ (p. 106) were clearly regarded by Peake as different poems, since he printed the latter in Rhymes Without Reason (1944) and the former two years later in Titus Groan (1946), despite having (apparently) written it first. ‘Deliria’ (pp. 63–4) is a different poem from ‘The Camel’ (p. 96); both versions of ‘How Good It Is to Be Alone’ (pp. 71–3) and of ‘The Sunlight Lies upon the Fields’ / ‘The Sunlight Falls Upon the Grass’ (pp. 64 and 80) have something distinctive to recommend them; and ‘I Must Begin to Comprehend’ (p. 122) and ‘The Threads Remain’ (p. 123) has each its own atmosphere, despite the number of lines they have in common. The lines ‘Half tragical, half magical, / And half an hour, or two’ occur in both of the latter poems as well as in ‘What a Day It’s Been!’ (p. 90), which Peake published in Rhymes without Reason three years or so before inscribing ‘The Threads Remain’ in his 1947 notebook. Each pair of poems or duplicated lines, whether placed side by side in this edition or separated by several pages, gives us the pleasure of noting the different sorts of ‘nowhere’ to which nonsense can lead us from the same starting point – or how it can lead us to the same ‘nowhere’ from different points of origin. The journeys of nonsense extend over time as well as space, and are thus interwoven with the personal history of writers and readers as inseparably as the poems in this book are interwoven with the calamitous events of the Second World War and its aftermath.

Unlike the serious poems, Peake’s nonsense verse makes no reference to contemporary historical events – with the notable exception of the fragment ‘Thank God for a Tadpole’ (p. 42), which is carefully dated 28 August 1939 (and is not exactly nonsense). It could be said, though, that this very rejection of its times by the nonsense verse is a kind of engagement with them. Many of the poems here concern themselves with resistance to entrapment:

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