Another anonymous choice this week: a nonsense poem called “To Marie”.
If the soul cannot snoop at the giggle-some cart,
Anon
Seeking surcease in gluggety-glug,
It is useless to say to the pulsating heart,
“Panky-doodle ker-chuggetty-chug!”
Poem 451. To Marie
When the breeze from the bluebottle’s blustering blim
Twirls the toads in a tooroomaloo,
And the whiskery whine of the wheedlesome whim
Drowns the roll of the rattatattoo,
Then I dream in the shade of the shally-go-shee,
And the voice of the bally-molay
Brings the smell of stale poppy-cods blummered in blee
From the willy-wad over the way.
Ah, the shuddering shoo and the blinketty-blanks
When the yungalung falls from the bough
In the blast of a hurricane’s hicketty-hanks
On the hills of the hocketty-how!
Give the rigamarole to the clangery-whang,
If they care for such fiddlededee;
But the thingumbob kiss of the whangery-bang
Keeps the higgledy-piggle for me.
L’ENVOI
It is pilly-po-doddle and aligobung
When the lollypop covers the ground,
Yet the poldiddle perishes punketty-pung
When the heart jimmy-coggles around.
If the soul cannot snoop at the giggle-some cart,
Seeking surcease in gluggety-glug,
It is useless to say to the pulsating heart,
“Panky-doodle ker-chuggetty-chug!”
This poem reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” and James Whitcomb Riley’s “Spirk Troll-Derisive” because it is filled with invented words that seem like they ought to make sense.
I found it in the Project Gutenberg eBook of The Book of Humorous Verse where it is credited to John Bennett—he did write a poem of the same name but it is a tender love poem, not a nonsense poem.
Since the date of the poem is uncertain, it is perhaps interesting to examine the etymology of the words that are not inventions.
Thingumbob is derived from the obsolete placeholder thingum and is recorded by the writer Tobias Smollett in 1751.
Fiddlededee is an interjection meaning rubbish or nonsense and is formed from the base word fiddle perhaps by echoing tweedlededee, a slang term for a fiddler. This is first recorded before 1784.
Rigamarole comes from Middle English of the 13th Century: “Ragman Roll”, originally describing long official documents. It was first written “rigmarole” in around 1736 and meant a rambling story or incoherent harangue.
Higgledy-piggle (or more commonly higgledy-piggledy) is first recorded in John Florio’s 1598 English—Italian dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes.
I like the poem because it shows such great invention: words and phrases that I want to use myself—particularly “Panky-doodle ker-chuggety-chug!” which sounds as if it could be used anywhere.
I can’t find any performances of the poem online which is unsurprising really.