This week’s choice is “The Great Panjandrum” by Samuel Foote.
a great she-bear, coming down the street,
Samuel Foote (1720—1777)
pops its head into the shop.
What! no soap?
Poem 406. The Great Panjandrum
So she went into the garden
to cut a cabbage-leaf
to make an apple-pie;
and at the same time
a great she-bear, coming down the street,
pops its head into the shop.
What! no soap?
So he died,
and she very imprudently married the Barber:
and there were present
the Picninnies,
and the Joblillies,
and the Garyulies,
and the great Panjandrum himself,
with the little round button at top;
and they all fell to playing the game of catch-as-catch-can,
till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.
This piece of nonsense verse was written by the Cornish actor Samual Foote to test the memory of a rival actor, Charles Macklin. Macklin claimed that he could remember any text perfectly even if he read it only once, and Foote challenged this assertion with this extemporary piece, now generally known as The Great Panjandrum.
It is interesting because Foote wrote it long before Lewis Carroll’s nonsense verses from Wonderland or Edward Lear’s works and while it wasn’t really intended as nonsense verse, Randolph Caldicott altered the formatting in 1885 so that it reads more like a poem. The lines run together to make a kind of sense, but there is no meaning in the words.
The poem also links to one of my favourite authors: Nevil Shute. During the Second World War, he worked on a top secret rocket-propelled weapon which he christened the Panjandrum. The word has been generally used ironically to describe a self-important official and should therefore be in widespread use these days.
There are several performances on YouTube, so I have chosen the one by Lucy Perry for LibriVox Weekly Poetry. There is also a video giving the history of Shute’s weapon.