1/6 it’s Epiphany and 2001 Insurrection Day, and there’s fresh news from the salamander hotline, a follow-up to my writing yesterday, in the posting “That’s a lotta axolotl”:
I have known about axolotls since the 1950s, when Mad magazine was responsible for potrzebie as a non sequitur nonsense word, ferschlugginer as a sort of all-purpose modifier of negative affect, … and axolotl as a nonsense reference.
Which elicited this comment from Robert Coren:
As you may not be surprised to learn, my thoughts also went to Mad magazine as soon as I saw the word. I particularly remember fragments of a parody of Wordsworth’s Daffodils …
I omit RC’s recollections, which are indeed fragmentary, after the first two lines (memory is a fickle thing); but the parody / burlesque (which I’d forgotten about) manages to be both clever (maintaining the form of the Wordsworth — 6-line verses of iambic tetrameter, with rhyme pattern ABABCC — and catching its spirit) and crude, just as a Mad parody ought to be.
(Rhymes for axolotl are not plentiful: the Mad parody uses bottle, twice, rejecting glottal, throttle, and wattle, and also AmE waddle, twaddle, toddle, swaddle, coddle, and model.)
Mad‘s axolotl poem. From issue #43 (1958), reproduced here with centered lines in a sans-serif font:
(#1)
And then the Wordsworth original from (1807), reproduced here with serif-font centered lines:
Daffodils
(#2)
Mad’s first verse parodizes Wordworth’s first, and Mad‘s last verse Wordsworth’s last, but Mad‘s middle verse is fresh playfulness unrelated to Wordsworth’s middle verses. So: establish the parodic scheme at the beginning, then diverge from it, only to return to the scheme as closure — see the discussion in Zwicky & Zwicky, “Patterns First, Exceptions Later” (1986), available on-line here.