Three Ladies Beside the Sea

Rhoda Levine, ill. Edward Gorey, New York Review Children’s Collection, 40pp, 978 1 59017 354 1, £9.99 hbk

Three Ladies Beside the Sea was first published in 1963. Edward Gorey’s stylised but strikingly expressive drawings have stood the test of time, and many readers will value the book for those drawings alone, especially in such a handsome hardback reissue.

The text, which consists of rhyming quatrains by the director and choreographer Rhoda Levine, is another matter. Where Gorey’s drawings are quirky, Levine’s text is arch. It tells the story of three ladies who live in adjacent houses by the sea, Edith of Ecstasy, Catherine of Compromise, and Alice of Hazard. Alice has a dangerous habit of perching in a tree, which puzzles the others. They ask her why, and she tells them,

“But alas, I am driven up into that tree,

To search and to scan the wide sky.

I am looking out there for a bird I saw once,

Who sang to me as he flew by.”

This is not poetry, it is doggerel. There is none of the vitality of true poetry, and none of its heightened intensity. Just flat language, predictable rhymes, and lumpen rhythms. Try reading it aloud, and you will find it almost impossible to happily marry scansion and meaning. It could be argued that the text is playful nonsense in the Lear tradition, but to read it side-by-side with Lear simply emphasises the huge gulf between Lear’s irrepressible readability and inexhaustible relish for language, and Levine’s timid surrealism. For Edward Gorey fans only.