A naughty boy

Do you recognise this verse:

There was a naughty boy

And a naughty boy was he

He ran away to Scotland

The people for to see

And he found that the ground

Was as hard as a yard was long

And a song was as merry

As a cherry was red

And lead was as weighty

And four score was still eighty

And a door was as wooden as in England

And he stood in his shoes and he wondered he wondered

He stood in his shoes and he wondered

?

Do you know the author?

I didn't. Not until yesterday, when I looked it up, and this is the first time I have ever seen this verse written down. Yet I have remembered it from the one time I heard it almost 60 years ago, when my father told it to me. I don't have a very good memory at the best of times, and so how and why did I remember all of these lines?

Well, strictly speaking, I didn't. I remembered the most important words and lines and, over a period of time (don't recall exactly how long it took), I filled in the gaps.

This is the point. One of the key features of traditional poetry is that it is easy to remember. The repeated rhyme and rhythm patterns help us to remember the words. A poem is a story told in the oral tradition. The oral storytelling tradition is older than writing and relies on memory tricks. Not just the rhyme and rhythm, but sometimes inclusion of bawdy sexual references, absurdities, or familiar names and places to fix the story in our minds.

The actual content of the story of the naughty boy is of no particular importance to me and yet the poem, or rather this excerpt from a poem, is of profound importance. When Dad told me this poem he gave me, not just the gift of a story, he gave me the ability to tell that story to any other person or group of people at any time. I did not read this story, I heard it. I would not need to read it in order to tell it again. Just like I would not need to read The Owl and the Pussycat or Jack and Jill Went Up the Hill.

Before I wrote this story, yesterday, I wondered who the poet was, and who the naughty boy might be. I made use of a search engine (or 'artificial intelligence' as everyone now likes to call these useful digital computer programs) to find out. The poet is John Keats, who wrote it in 1818.

Keats wrote this poem when he was on holiday in Scotland. He sent it home in a letter to his sister Fanny, to entertain her while he was away. He referred to this amusing, self-mocking poem as a ‘song of myself’. It is a poem in four stanzas. Most of it is, to me, uninteresting but I did quite like this bit:

There was a naughty boy

And a naughty boy was he,

For nothing would he do

But scribble poetry

This, it seems to me, is the whole point of the poem. Reading it made me smile. Instead of learning a profession, becoming a doctor, lawyer, a man of commerce, Fanny's brother writes poems, no doubt to the exasperation of their parents.

What do you do?

I am a poet.

Oh, what a naughty boy!