Lafferty's Doggerel

When Gospel-trumpeter, surrounded

With long-eared rout, to battle sounded,

And pulpit, drum ecclesiastic,

Was beat with fist, instead of a stick;

Then did Sir Knight abandon dwelling,

And out he rode a-colonelling.

Those lines come from Hudibras, Samuel Butler’s scathing seventeenth-century takedown of Cromwell's England. But they sound a lot like Lafferty. There is playful savagery and a sharp-elbowed rhythm that cuts and capers—and there is Lafferty’s beloved a-prefixing.

My academic background is in classics and 18th-century British literature—the great age of the heroic couplet. Dryden and Pope brought the form to its pinnacle. Today, most students despise it and struggle to endure it for any length of time. The decline of the heroic couplet is a long, complicated, sad story, but one thing is certain: Lafferty loved it. He loved every kind of couplet.

The usual shade thrown at early 18th-century poetry is that it is versified prose. And it’s true that the period's obsession with the heroic couplet led to aesthetic absurdity. For example, Dryden wanted to make Paradise Lost rhyme. The wonderfully gossipy John Aubrey wrote that Dryden

"went to [Milton] to have leave to put his Paradise Lost into a Drama in Rhyme. Mr. Milton received him civilly, and told him that he would give him leave to tag his verses."

Pope’s translations of Homer stand out as another. Despite such excesses, the heroic couplet is one of the sharpest intellectual weapons English poetry ever devised. It is concise and epigrammatic; it can be both logical and persuasive. Its balance makes it suited to the elevated and to the mock-serious; and it delivers a savage satirical bite like no other—because it can hover with its pauses--its caesurae--before it hits its target in slow motion. No wonder Lafferty loved it. Even when he strayed from the heroic couplet, he typically favored other couplet forms.

If most Space Chantey readers are anything like my students, they probably grow impatient with its couplets and skim past them as so much versified prose. But I think Lafferty is doing something more with them than versifying the novel: he is using them to generate the novel as he goes. He tells us so in a sly way:

“Whence the doggerel, good Bramble?” Roadstrum asked.

“It’s a popular epic composing itself these days,” said Bramble. “It’s called The Lay of Road-Storm, and it’s about yourself.”

To overlook the couplets Lafferty put into Space Chantey is to miss much of the book’s charm.

Someday, I’d like to understand how Lafferty's use of the couplet shaped his creative process. We know he was an obsessive rhymester, compulsively composing doggerel in his head as he walked, and something about the couplet as a form—with his signature chomping consonants—seemed to supercharge his imagination. Part of this is likely the violent juxtaposition the form enables; another part is its logical structure, which thrives on devices like antithesis and was suited his temperament.

A few months ago, I sat down and wrote glosses for the Lay of Road-Storm to determine its intellectual compression. What I found surprised me. Here are the first 50 lines. I mention this in the glosses, but notice how Lafferty tweaks the noses of the heroic hexameters of Homer and Virgil with his choice of iambic hexameter. That is subtle, funny, and very Lafferty.

1. The Lay of Road-Storm from the ancient Chronicles

A space epic in the form of a shanty. A galactic chronicle of Captain Roadstrum—flawed yet heroic. Encounters: Lotophage’s temptations, Lamos ogres, Siren-Zo’s song, Aeaea’s witchery. High-stakes gambling, spectral illusions, treacherous asteroid belts, the Hellpepper escape. Themes of myth, storytelling, and human defiance. Final act: a supernova death paralleling Dante’s version of Odysseus’ death.

2. We give you here, Good Spheres and Cool-Boy Conicals,

Playful address to the reader. "Good Spheres" and "Cool-Boy Conicals"

This is scale with slang: planets, conical spaceships, and flight paths.

3. And perils pinnacled and parts impossible

Greek epic: epainos praise, kelos immortal fame, and alazoneia arrogance."Perils pinnacled": towering, extreme dangers. "Parts impossible": surreal, fantastical realms. Evokes epic themes—praise, fame, arrogance. Sets tone: grand adventure, boundary-breaking exploits.

Playing with alliterative poetry connotations. Beowulf. Gawain.

4. And every word of it the sworn-on Gosipel.

Parodies sacredness of Greek epic traditions.

Pun on epic oral poetry as high gossip.

5. Lend ear while things incredible we bring about

Direct appeal to the audience in the style of oral poetry. But the muse is absent.

Tale will be incredible in both senses—no sacred song.

6. And Spacemen dead and deathless yet we sing about:—

Immortal names achieved through great deeds: Achilles and Odysseus.

7. And some were weak and wan, and some were strong enough,

Juxtaposes human frailty and resilience, recurring theme in epic tradition.

Lafferty uses Scriblerian techniques: “wan” and “enough” sink “weak” and “strong.’

8. And some got home, but damn it took them long enough!

Nod to the prolonged, trial-filled journey of Odysseus in The Odyssey.

9. Where fiddlers scree’d and Rabelaisians loped, it was,

Allusion to fiddler on Lotophage, a Lafferty stand-in.

Rabelaisian excess, grotesque humor, and the carnivalesque.

10. And Maybe Jones had walked the streets and hoped it was.

Peripatetic archetype, perpetual searching.

Odyssey and epic vs picaresque, Lafferty’s rhetorical strategy.

11. So glad a land, you’d never find a grouser there.

Bogus utopia. Past Master.

Another alliterative hemistich verse joke.

Sly rhetorical antithesis: glad a land, you’d never find a grouser . . .

12. They said a man could really throw a rouser there!

Litotes. Not Bacchic revels but lotus eaters.

Laffertian pun: “rouser” as big bash, arousal, and waking up lotus eaters.

13. Ah well, ’twas good enough for Lotophagians,

Recognition of Bacchic/Lotus contrast; a dig at the Lotophagians

14. But how about the horny hopping shaggy uns?

Roadstrum’s crew hop from planet to planet in spacecraft called “hornets”

Shaggy “whisker clocks” on crewman.

Sexual joke: horny shaggy ‘uns. Why they went to Lotophage.

15. How turned the bright-eyed crew to sleepy gooney guys?

Gooney = foolish but sailor slang, appropriately: Sleepy Sailor Bar.

Gooney = also a name for albatross.

Astronautical.

16. How have a high old night with afternooney guys?

Always afternoon on Lotophage.

Triple pun: having grand time, getting high, needing to break the lethargy and get out of planetary atmosphere.

17. All lusty liquor with a crystal cask for it,

18. Whatever wished one only has to ask for it.

Travesty of Matthew 7:7 “Ask, and it shall be given.”

19. Tall pleasures piled in infinite variety,

Peri-bathos. Crew are called “tall ones” in Chapter One. “Piled” up in slumber.

20. Raw rolling gluttony without satiety:

Inferno, Canto 6, and Purgatorio, Canto 23.

21. And under sheen than all things else is awesomer

Caustic irony.

22. A golden worm that gnaws and gnaws and gnaws some more.

“for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched”

golden light of afternoon.

William Blake’s “The Sick Rose.”

23. One needs for picture of the Laestrygonians

Ogres martial values closer to Greek figures in epic poetry than are the hornem crewmen.

24. All hump-backed cuss-words and vile polyphonians.

Sexual invective: the “hump-backed cuss-words.”

25. “We’ll cry a warning here though we be hung for it!”

Sets up joke in next line.

26. The fact is, not a crewman had the tongue for it.

Crew doesn’t speak Old Norse, so lacks tongue, but crew will have tongues cut out

Chiastic pattern: tongueless at beginning of episode and at end of episode.

27. Those boys are rough, nor steel nor steinn can stay with them;

Steel and stone but also a drinking stein = big breakfast reference.

28. You’d better have visceral blood to play with them.

Bloody guts to spill one’s blood, as the dead rise each morning in Valhalla to fight

again.

29. That human meat and mind should ever rout the things!

Roadstrum’s lack of Odysseus’ cunning.

30. We trim to decent measure these giganticals

Double meaning: “measure” refers to sizing up the giants and to the poetic meter of the

lines.Lafferty is employing a doggerel iambic hexameter, parodying the quantitative

hexameter of Greek and Roman epic poetry, rather than heroic iambic pentameter. This fits with the longer alliterative line. Other options for long mock-poetry would be Hudibrastics. or rollicking tetrameter.

31. And couch the tale in shaggy-people canticles.

“Shaggy dog” story--meandering and humorous style.

Canticles are part of the liturgical tradition—the Magnificat, the Benedictus, the Nunc Dimittis, etc.

The “Gosipel.”

32. “The little bug has got the glitter eyes of him,

Bjorn’s amusement at Roadstrum.

33. You can’t go by the pepper-picking size of him.

Small can belie great strength, likening Roadstrum to David vs Goliath in 1 Samuel 17.

Also joke for the re-reader: Hellpepper episode.

34. We look and hoot, ‘That must be only half of him.’

Bjorn mocking Roadstrum’s comparatively small height.

35. We laugh at him and laugh at him and laugh at him.

Hubris. Bjorn mocks Roadstrum’s lack of timē and kleos.

Lafferty is mocking epic.

36. He be tall eater and a taller topian,

Refers to Roadstrum at “big breakfast.”

Bjorn is watches him eat.

“Topian” = the Rabelaisian excess of the giant Pantagruel and drunken revelry, toper.

37. No mind the little fellow’s microscopian.

38. We pitch a party, sling the dangest dangeroo.

“Dogfight” on the rock slabs and the aristeiai of Bjorn/Pluckett and Bjorn/Roadstrum.

39. Whoop, whoop and holler! He’s a hero-hangeroo!”

Bjorn’s excitement over Roadstrum’s fighting spirit.

Does Roadstrum fight like a kangaroo?

40. They took to air all bloodily and retchingly,

The Laestrygonians mutilate the spacemen, cutting out their tongues. The spacemen choke on blood, horror.

Not heroic behavior: wretchedly.

41. They made new tongues, but didn’t make them fetchingly,

The “false tongue” will become a motif, i.e. the computer’s False Tongue!

The legendary deceptiveness of Odysseus travestied.

42. And flew through chartless skies where none had fled before;

Evokes the uncharted journeys of The Odyssey and The Aeneid.

While Aeneas flees Troy with Virgil crafting justifications through Aphrodite and Creusa, here, flight is stripped of any heroic pretense—mere running away. An escalation of bathos.

43. Whatever came, at least they’d all been dead before.

44. But one thing worked, whatever else might nix the things,

Hondstarfer’s name means “hand work,” fittingly as he has repaired the ship.

45. That hammer-handling kid had really fixed the things.

Hammer-handling Hondstarfer = ingenuity of Homeric H’s: Hermes and Hephaestus.

46. All bloody luck they ever got away like that,

Parallels Odysseus’ reliance on luck, with “bloody” adding a literal note due to the mutilated tongues and the gore of the escape.

Bloody as a curse, literally a vile polyphonian sound.

47. They sure did never want another day like that!

48. And Roadstrum shucked another layer fretfully:

Shuck: remove; shuck, deceive, i.e. what gets Odysses in so much trouble: false tongue.

Roadstrum’s stature as a giant hero.

49. One gives up giantizing most regretfully.

A case of amphiboly: 'giantizing' refers both to killing giants and striving for greatness in the Homeric sense.

50. All lost in space, the hide-bound inner side of it,

Nod to the Lost in Space TV series 1965–1968.

Laffertian pun: 'hide-bound' as being unable to change; trapped in the asteroid belt; 'bound for the hide' of the space calf; and physically bound to the hide via lassos.