Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs — Story, Setting & Ideas

The Logic of Nonsense

Gilbert's nonsense operates on a rigorous internal logic. In 'The Yarn of the Nancy Bell,' the elderly mariner claims to be 'a cook and a captain bold, / And the mate of the Nancy brig, / And a bo'sun tight, and a midshipmite, / And the crew of the captain's gig.' The narrator's literal-minded response—'I'll eat my hand if I understand / How you can possibly be' all those roles—sets up a punchline that is both absurd and, within the poem's cannibalistic premise, perfectly consistent. Similarly, 'The Bishop and the Busman' hinges on a syllogism: a bishop marries a busman to a lady, but the busman's professional duty to 'drive' his wife leads to a logical tangle. Gilbert treats these contradictions with the gravity of a legal argument, making the humor depend on the reader's recognition of the gap between formal rules and lived reality.

Musical and Metrical Craft

The Savoy Songs section demonstrates Gilbert's skill in matching verse form to character and situation. 'The Modern Major-General' uses rapid-fire rhyming couplets to convey the officer's encyclopedic but useless knowledge. 'The Policeman's Lot' employs a plodding rhythm that mirrors the constable's weary resignation. In 'The Sorcerer's Song,' the magician John Wellington Wells rattles off his inventory in breathless anapests: 'We've a first class assortment of magic; / And for raising a posthumous shade / With effects that are comic or tragic, / There's no cheaper house in the trade.' The verse often incorporates internal rhymes and lists—'prophesy / With a wink of his eye, / Peep with security / Into futurity'—creating a musical patter that emphasizes the absurdity of the content. Gilbert's metrical precision is never merely decorative; it reinforces the comic tension between formality and chaos.

Social Satire Through Role Reversal

Several poems in the collection use role reversal to critique social pretensions. 'The Ape and the Lady' presents an ape who 'bought white ties, and he bought dress suits, / He crammed his feet into bright tight boots' and renames himself 'Darwinian Man,' yet the lady rejects him because 'a Man, however well-behaved, / At best is only a monkey shaved!' The satire targets both the pretensions of social climbing and the reductive view of human nature implied by evolutionary theory. 'The British Tar' parodies jingoistic ideals of masculinity: the ideal sailor's 'fist should be ready to resist / A dictatorial word,' and his 'customary attitude' is a caricature of aggressive posturing. 'The Coming Bye and Bye' laments aging with a mock-heroic tone, cataloging physical decline—'Silvered is the raven hair, / Spreading is the parting straight'—in a way that undercuts the sentimental tradition of poems about lost youth.

Readers will find that Gilbert's humor rewards attention to his verbal dexterity and his willingness to let a joke unfold over several stanzas. The ballads and songs are best read aloud, as the rhythms and rhymes are designed for performance. Notice how he uses formal verse structures to contain—and heighten—the absurdity of his scenarios. The collection offers a window into Victorian comic sensibility, where wit and wordplay are valued over sentiment, and where the most ridiculous situations are treated with the utmost seriousness.

Old Gilbert’s verses know how rigid rules turn silly, yet the human pulse beneath them. So does an old schoolroom favorite, Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two — Story, Setting & Ideas. Both sit quietly on my shelf, whispering that even in our most proper postures, a laugh or a tender tear waits to untangle us.