Works and Prayers of a Fils Prodigue

“Far and few, far and few
are the lands where the Jumblies live;
They heads are green and their hands are blue,
and they went to Sea in a Sieve.”
– Edward Lear, “The Jumblies”

What could make a young man, walking briskly to his home while trying to outwit the impending rain, begin to sing a little tune, “walking, walking, walking down the street; stomping, stomping, stomping with my feet; thunder ahead fills his heart with dread of rain and hail and sleet” as though he were an imperiled ship captain spurring his tired feet to row on? I have an idea. The man is, first of all, likely to be a buffoon [I am]. Still, I’m beginning to think that the beauty of great literature — nay, of merely good literature — is not that it compels men to write symphonies, or to compose epics, but that it fills their hearts with simple poetry and simple thoughts. You can only read so many poems of Jumblies and the Moon and the Zhongy-Bhongy-Bo before you find yourself murmuring lyrics about taking a pot from the stove and putting the cornbread on to bake [pulling out the pot now puffing/ hoping yet for tasty stuffing].

One reading of A.A. Milne (Winnie the Pooh) or Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows), and one begins to see the merit of the good books: the joy, the poetry, the delight, the simplicity, the virtue, the friendship, the humor, the songs. They fill the heart; they make the dreary days seem shorter, as though they were the ripe satsumas begging to alight from their branches: you must pick them, lest they fall to the ground and rot!