Solomon Grundy

Solomon Grundy is a poem in a pleasing rhyme ( nursery school rhyme ), which was written in 1842 by James Orchard Halliwell - Phillipps. It is often learned by heart to this day, especially in American kindergartens and preschools for young children and has in the United States in American popularity approximately to the importance attached to the children's song " Johnny Klein" has in Germany.

Content

The poem describes the life of a man named Solomon Grundy, which is retold in a single eight-line (or in a simplified alternative version in a ten-line ) stanza.

Man, however, Solomon Grundy itself remains oddly impersonal in this description of the individual stages of his life: about him as a person, about his thoughts and feelings, the poem says nothing. Instead, Grundy learns only a more passive characterization by describing the effects of the weather that prevailed at the most important days of his life. The poem makes use of two linguistic artifices that convey the heart -learning and lecture playful children at an impression of the possibilities of the medium language.

On the one hand, the poem turns to the phenomenon of non-simultaneity of the Simultaneous by giving the impression that Grundy's entire life with all stations expired from birth, about the wedding until death in just a week: This is done by years spaced events are enumerated seamlessly, and which, although the correct order of the sequence of events is maintained, but the time interval between these events is always concealed. At the same time any of the events listed will always respectively on the week on which the previous event took place subsequent week prefixed ( birth taking place on Monday, the baptism on Tuesday, the marriage on Wednesday, etc.), without mentioning that this the following week in a later year.

So Grundy's life is on the one hand compressed in a drastic way, at the same time experiencing the really very short portion of one week a tremendous strain, so that opposing movement actions collide and thus leave an impression of the bizarre.

The second trick that is used, is the paradoxical reverse flows: Grundy's life begins happy and develops gradually to mourn out at the same time, the development of the weather, the background against which Grundy's decline is happening, in stark contrast to his own downfall: while Grundy's initial life is good and getting worse, prevails to his birth bad weather, which is getting better gradually, the worse it goes Grundy, more gratifying are the ( climatic ) conditions in the environment, the background against which happens to be bad luck. While his personal inner world deteriorated in their state and on, the state of the outside world improved.

Etymology

It is believed that the name Solomon Grundy from the name of the English food Salmagundi (a type of salad consisting of boiled meat, cabbage, anchovies, spices and eggs ) is derived, which in turn was taken from the French cuisine in the English. The name of the dish is believed to have been bowdlerized in the 18th century in the United States phonetically Solomon Grundy.

Influence on American pop culture

Solomon Grundy is due to the extremely high awareness of the poem in the United States often referred to as a " reference object " is used in American pop culture.