page_title: Morris Bishop
section_title: Light verse
hierarchical_section_title: Morris Bishop / Writings / Light verse
caption_attribution_description: English: Three poetry collections by Morris Bishop (flanked by irrelevant Pelicans)
context_page_description: Morris Gilbert Bishop was an American scholar, historian, biographer, essayist, translator, anthologist, and versifier.
context_section_description: Bishop had a high regard for light verse:
  The aim of poetry, or Heavy Verse, is to seek understanding in forms of beauty. The aim of light verse is to promote misunderstanding in beauty's cast-off clothes. But even misunderstanding is a kind of understanding; it is an analysis, an observation of truth, which sneaks around truth from the rear, which uncovers the lath and plaster of beauty's hinder parts.
  Bishop's obituary in The New York Times describes him as "an extraordinarily gifted writer" of light verse, publishing "about fifteen poems and casuals a year in the New Yorker over a period of over thirty years. Bishop also published verse in Saturday Evening Post, Poetry, The Colonnade, The Measure, The Smart Set, Judge, Saturday Review of Literature and the earlier Life.
  The New York Times obituary goes on to mention that Bishop was an "authority" on limericks, and a very facile composer of them.
  Bishop's comic poems were collected in three volumes during his lifetime: Paramount Poems (whose title page reads " 'If it isn't a PARAMOUNT, it isn't a poem.' — Morris Bishop"), Spilt Milk and A Bowl of Bishop.
  "How to Treat Elves", probably his best-known poem, describes a conversation with "The wee-est little elf." When asked what he does, the elf tells the narrator "'I dance 'n fwolic about . . . 'n scuttle about and play.'" A few stanzas describe his activities surprising butterflies, "fwightening" Mr. Mole by jumping out and saying "Boo," and swinging on cobwebs. He asks the narrator "what do you think of that?" The narrator replies:
  "It gives me sharp and shooting pains
  
     To listen to such drool."
  
  I lifted up my foot and squashed
  
     The God damn little fool.
  Taking up R. C. Trevelyan's challenge (in Thamyris, or Is There a Future for Poetry?) to write on a modern subject "and dispute Virgil's supremacy in this field", Bishop produced "Gas and Hot Air". It describes the operation of a car engine; "Vacuum pulls me; and I come! I come!" cries the gasoline, which reaches
  [T]he secret bridal chamber where
  
     The earth-born gas first comes to kiss its bride,
  
  The heaven-born and yet inviolate air
  
     Which is, on this year's models, purified.
  "Ozymandias Revisited" reproduces the first two stanzas of Shelley's poem verbatim, then closes:
  And on the pedestal these words appear:
  
  "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings
  
  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
  
  Also the names of Emory P. Gray,
  
  Mr. and Mrs. Dukes, and Oscar Baer
  
  Of 17 West 4th St., Oyster Bay.
  Bennett Cerf's Houseful of Laughter (1963) included Bishop's 1950 poem "Song of the Pop-Bottlers", which starts:
  Pop bottles pop-bottles
  
  In pop shops;
  
  The pop-bottles Pop bottles
  
  Poor Pop drops.
  Bishop also wrote a poem about special relativity, "E = mc²", which ends:
  Come little lad; come little lass;
  
  Your docile creed recite:
  
  "We know that Energy equals Mass
  
  by the Square of the Speed of Light!"
  On receiving advance notice from the Dial Press about publication of A Bowl of Bishop, Harvey Breit was most impressed by "A Critical Appreciation of Morris Bishop" written (tongue in cheek, by Bishop himself) for the book, and wondered: "Is this the jacket copy to end all (non-factual) jacket copy?" The New York Times review of the book quoted Bishop on the aim of light verse (see above), and commented: "at that kind of understood misunderstanding, Mr. Bishop is one of the pre-eminentest".
  The Best of Bishop, a posthumous (1980) anthology by Charlotte Putnam Reppert, received a short and dismissive review in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the anonymous reviewer saying that Ogden Nash's poetry was "kinder" than Bishop's, James Thurber's was "droller", and "that of both – better".
caption: Three poetry collections by Bishop (flanked by irrelevant Pelicans)
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