And:The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to seaIn a beautiful pea-green boat
It was first published in 1871 in a collection called Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets. If you have never read the poem in it's entirety, you can do so here. It's quite a treat!Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl!How charmingly sweet you sing!
Edward Lear, the poem's author, was born on this day, May 12, in 1812 in Holloway, England. Here are a few nuggets about Lear and The Owl and the Pussy-Cat:
- Lear was the twentieth of twenty-one children.
- He was an epileptic.
- As an adult, Lear was a prolific letter-writer, sometimes writing as many as 35 friends before breakfast.
- Lear loved to coin new words and phrases. He first used the term runcible spoon in The Owl and the Pussy-Cat. It is now defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a kind of fork, curved like a spoon and typically having three broad prongs, one of which has a sharp edge. (Does this sound like a spork to anyone else? It's not quite how I dreamed a runcible spoon would look.)
- Beatrix Potter wrote a prequel to The Owl and the Pussy-Cat called The Tale of Little Pig Robinson in which Piggy-wig travels to the Land where the Bong-Tree grows. It was published in 1930.
De Jong, Mary. "Edward Lear." Critical Survey Of Poetry, Second Revised Edition (2002): 1-5. Literary Reference Center. Web. 12 May 2015.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edward_Lear_The_Owl_and_the_Pussy_Cat_1.jpg
"runcible, adj." OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 12 May 2015.
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