{"id":253,"date":"2016-03-05T11:42:55","date_gmt":"2016-03-05T11:42:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/?p=253"},"modified":"2016-03-11T10:08:36","modified_gmt":"2016-03-11T10:08:36","slug":"homer-the-gruffalo-rupert-bear-and-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/?p=253","title":{"rendered":"Homer, The Gruffalo, Rupert Bear and me"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Of the many old-fashioned qualities and \u201ckinds\u201d that I miss in contemporary poetry \u2013 narrative drive, humour, epic sweep and imaginative scope, for instance \u2013 some are to be found preserved unselfconsciously in verse for children.\u00a0 I would argue that Julia Donaldson\u2019s best books \u2013 notably The Gruffalo, The Gruffalo\u2019s Child, Stick<\/em> Man, <\/em>and Room on the Broom<\/em> –\u00a0 deserve to be considered as (possibly) contributing more to the future of poetry than scores of slim vols which pour off the\u00a0 presses (and\u00a0 take themselves so seriously) every month.\u00a0\u00a0 My granddaughters could babble phrases, even whole verses, from Room on the Broom<\/em> even before they could properly talk.\u00a0 The Gruffalo<\/em>, happily illustrated by Axel Sheffler, is Julia Donaldson\u2019s best known creation.\u00a0 And what an epic story it is.\u00a0\u00a0 Set in an archetypal Jungian forest, our mouse hero is surrounded by\u00a0dangers lurking on all sides.\u00a0 Absurdly small in this world of big terrors (and I like the way the TV cartoon version emphasises the dangers around every jungly corner)\u00a0the mouse\u00a0learns to confront\u00a0 monsters as frightening as anything encountered by Odysseus – mostly by developing classic trickster qualities.\u00a0 Most importantly he learns the psychological lesson that bullies can themselves be out-bullied .\u00a0 The Gruffalo \u2013 his eyes are orange, his tongue is black; he has purple prickles down his back<\/em> \u2013 is a construct of all the little mouse’s worst fears but turns out to be the\u00a0 biggest fool of them all. So Aeneas can trick poor old Cyclops and Brer Rabbit can out-fox the Fox. \u00a0A\u00a0sequel, The Gruffalo\u2019s Child<\/em>, is almost as successful and perhaps more humorous than the original,\u00a0 but this time the mouse’s trick\u00a0 – he\u00a0 makes his shadow appear more frightening by posing in front a full moon –\u00a0 seems to me more literal\u00a0 and therefore less subtle than the mind games\u00a0he plays in the first story.\u00a0 It should be noted that all Julia Donaldson’s story poems\u00a0 employ such old-fashioned narrative devices as repetition with variation,\u00a0 heavy ballad like rhyme schemes,\u00a0 skipping non-iambic rhythms, and\u00a0 formulae such as the Rule of Three \u2013\u00a0 3 wishes, 3 encounters with monsters, 3 friendly animal guides etc – that are so much a part of the English \u201cvernacular\u201d\u00a0 tradition, from the anonymous Robin Hood ballads onwards.\u00a0 Stick Man<\/em> plumbs our most elemental insecurities \u00a0\u2013 the loss of family comfort and self-identity \u2013 as he ventures further and further away from the family tree. Stick Man too encounters \u00a0near-Homeric adventures in his wanderings.\u00a0 Some might object to the happy Christmassy ending;\u00a0waiting to be burnt alive on a log fire, Stick Man is able to deliver Santa Claus who is stuck up the chimney and, in return, is himself restored to the bosom\u00a0of his stick family in time for Christmas morning. But one feels that one is entitled to a happy ending after experiencing such a series of frights; perhaps that is one of the functions of children\u2019s stories \u2013 to return us to reassurance after introducing us to the possibility of insecurity, even terrors?.\u00a0\u00a0 One of my favourite Julia Donaldson\u00a0stories, Room on the Broom,<\/em> does much to rehabilitate the\u00a0maligned imaged of\u00a0the witch; her four rescue pets rescue her in turn from a dragon.\u00a0 Dragons, witches, monsters, forests, caves\u2026where else in poetry can you experience such archetypal landscapes and scenarios?\u00a0 As Edward Lear\u2019s \u201cnonsense\u201d narrative verse explored buried depths of loneliness and love-longing\u00a0in his Victorian audience, so these poems for children can, perhaps, serve to recover our forgotten notions of adventure and heroism. Apart from The Book – Bible readings at least twice a day – my own missionary childhood in Northern Nigeria was mostly bookless.\u00a0\u00a0 But I do remember the delight of discovering Rupert Bear stories when I was shipped back to England at the age of nine.\u00a0\u00a0 At that time everything about the Rupert Bear annuals\u00a0\u00a0 \u2013 the comic strip pictures, the prose\u00a0as well as\u00a0verse commentary \u2013 was all the work of Robert Bestall. (The later books, from the 1970s onwards, are inferior, the commercial product\u00a0 of teams of artists and writers).\u00a0 Bestall\u2019s brightly coloured squares were like windows into alternative \u00a0worlds where Rupert and his \u201cpals\u201d enjoyed adventures \u00a0on sub-tropical\u00a0 islands, in castles floating in the air or within caverns deep underground, always returning to the idyllic environs of Nutwood.. The boy \u201cpals\u201d,\u00a0 Bill Badger, Edward Trunk etc., all sport huge animal heads\u00a0 atop their natty English schoolboy attire, while the girl friends are allowed to be prettily themselves\u2026I wonder what a psychologist would make of that? \u00a0\u00a0Bestall himself was the child of missionary parents in China; his depiction of Oriental places and people \u2013 most notably the Pekinese dog-headed \u00a0Pong Ping, but also Tiger Lily and her conjurer father, alternately frightening and fascinating \u2013 must reflect something of his own sense of dislocation.\u00a0 For me\u00a0 an important discovery was how the stories could be sped along by reading the captions (in rhyming octosyllabics) beneath each picture; no need to go through all those slow-moving prose paragraphs\u2026no need to impede that headlong\u00a0rush to\u00a0adventure.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 Of the many old-fashioned qualities and \u201ckinds\u201d that I miss in contemporary poetry \u2013 narrative drive, humour, epic sweep and imaginative scope, for instance \u2013 some are to be found preserved unselfconsciously in verse for children.\u00a0 I would argue that Julia Donaldson\u2019s best books \u2013 notably The Gruffalo, The Gruffalo\u2019s Child, Stick Man, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-253","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":260,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions\/260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithchandlerpoet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}