Coda

Summary

‘Now – listen!’ wrote Lear to John Ruskin in 1886, ‘You must not bother yourself over my scroobiousnesses, –’ (SL 280). But so many writers have gone to the trouble of getting to know Lear's scroobiousnesses, and have found it no bother at all. Ruskin, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Stevie Smith, John Ashbery, Paul Muldoon and others are all changed by their encounter with Lear. Elizabeth Bishop loved him, and encouraged Robert Lowell to go back to his work anew. He wrote to her: ‘I have been rereading Lear whom you like so much. I guess it would be farfetched to find his hand here; yet I think he would have enjoyed your feeling, your disciplined gorgeousness, your drawing, your sadness, your amusement.’ The more intelligently and pleasurably we read Lear, the less far-fetched it seems to find his hand at work in the very widest compass of post-Victorian poetry, and to think that he would have enjoyed it.

Lear's feeling, his disciplined gorgeousness, his sadness and amusement, are all at the same time present in his final journal entry, dated 5 December 1887:

Dreariness. – Dinner at 1.30 – a beefstek mascherato – good in its way but nasty more or less. Out of doors, bright sun. Looking over journals of 1887. Weary work. Dinner at 1.–1.30 – afterwards – poltrona. It is now 2.30 – after the aftn. egg, I shall try & get some sleep if possible, but I have no light or life left in me. – And the flies are as horrible as ever. (Diary)

‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that,’ concedes Nell in Beckett's Endgame; and Lear, conscious of entering his own endgame – writing in, and from, a dark place – cannot resist the comedy of his own unhappiness. What is more delicious than the internal rhyme and rhythm of ‘after the afternoon egg’? Or more superbly full of misgivings than ‘good in its way but nasty more or less’? ‘Poltrona’, the Italian for ‘armchair’, hints also at ‘poltroon’, as if reproaching himself for his own cowardice in the face of everything.