Authors: Kathryn Petras
Very Bad Poetry (7 page)
The Royal Review
August 25, 1881
All hail to the Empress of India, Great Britain’s Queen—
Long may she live in health, happy and serene—
That came from London, far away,
To review the Scottish Volunteers in grand array:
Most magnificent to be seen,
Near by Salisbury Crags and its pastures green,
Which will long be remembered by our gracious Queen—
And by the Volunteers, that came from far away,
Because it rain’d most of the day.
And with the rain their clothes were wet all through,
On the 25th day of August, at the Royal Review.
And to the Volunteers it was no lark,
Because they were ankle deep in mud in the Queen’s Park.
The following poem is, to our knowledge, the only one ever written about Alois Senefelder.
The Sprig of Moss
[B]y taking the impressions of watch-cases he discovered, one day
What is now called the art of Lithography.
So Alois plodded on making known his great discovery,
Until he obtained the notice of the Royal Academy,
Besides, he obtained a gold Medal, and what was more dear to his heart,
He lived to see the wide extension of his art.
And when life’s prospects may at times appear dreary to ye,
Remember Alois Senefelder, the discoverer of Lithography.
The Clepington Catastrophe
Accidents will happen by land and by sea,
Therefore to save ourselves from accidents, we needn’t try to flee,
For whatsoever God ordained will come to pass
For instance, ye may be killed by a stone or piece of glass.
The Most Anticlimactic Poem
I
t is no easy task to take a dramatic subject and, through a line of ill-conceived verse, rob it of all drama whatsoever. Yet this is what the very bad poet does. The more advanced very bad poet takes it one step further—writing about a banal subject and descending to the even more banal with a thud.
from
The Grand Rapids Cricket Club
by
Julia A. Moore
When Mr. Dennis does well play,
His courage is full great,
And accidents to him occur,
But not much though, of late.
(1827-1906)
A
furniture maker by trade, James McIntyre turned his hand to poetry in order to help others appreciate the many wonders of Canada as he viewed them. Key among them: cheese. Few could argue with his rationale; to wit, “it is no insignificant theme.”
He also found other Canadian topics to write about, ranging from the appointment of a new whip in the Ontario legislature to bear hunting to an eighteen-foot ox exhibited at a fair. He even plugged his own furniture business in his inimitable style (“McIntyre has a few rows / Of the latest styles of Bureaus”). McIntyre turned out two books of poetry,
Musings on the Banks of Canadian Thames
and
Poems of James McIntyre
—both proof that he was a Canadian original, the North American equivalent of Scottish poet William McGonagall.
As one of his fans wrote, in a letter excerpted in McIntyre’s second collection of poems:
In writing you do not pretend
With Tennysonian themes to blend,
It is an independent style
Begotten on Canadian soil.
The following poem—one of McIntyre’s much vaunted “cheese odes”—is about an actual cheese. The particular cheese that merited such waxing weighed four tons and was displayed at a Toronto exposition circa 1855.
Weighing over
7,000
pounds
We have seen thee, queen of cheese,
Lying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze,
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.
All gaily dressed soon you’ll go
To the great Provincial show,
To be admired by many a beau
In the city of Toronto.
Cows numerous as a swarm of bees,
Or as the leaves upon the trees,
It did require to make thee please,
And stand unrivalled, queen of cheese.
May you not receive a scar as
We have heard that Mr. Harris
Intends to send you off as far as
The great world’s show at Paris.
Of the youth beware of these,
For some of them might rudely squeeze
And bite your cheek, then songs or glees
We could not sing, oh! queen of cheese.
We’rt thou suspended from balloon,
You’d cast a shade even at noon,
Folks would think it was the moon
About to fall and crush them soon.
These are two more examples of McIntyre’s dairy odes—proof that he fully deserved the epithet that was bestowed upon him: “the Cheese Poet.”
Oxford Cheese Ode
The ancient poets ne’er did dream
That Canada was land of cream
They ne’er imagined it could flow
In this cold land of ice and snow,
Where everything did solid freeze,
They ne’er hoped or looked for cheese.
In presenting this delicate, dainty morsel to the imagination of
the people I believed it could be realized. I viewed the machine
that turned and raised the mammoth cheese, and saw the
powerful machine invented by James Ireland at the West Oxford
companies’ factory to turn the great and fine cheese he was
making there. This company with but little assistance could
produce a ten ton cheese.
Who hath prophetic vision sees
In future times a ten ton cheese,
Several companies would join
To furnish curd for great combine,
More honor far than making gun
Of mighty size and many a ton.
Machine it could be made with ease
That could turn this monster cheese,
The greatest honour to our land
Would be this orb of finest brand,
Three hundred curd that would need squeeze
For to make this mammoth cheese.
So British lands could confederate
Three hundred provinces in one state,
When all in harmony agrees
To be pressed in one like this cheese,
Then one skilful hand could acquire
Power to move British empire.
But various curds must be combined
And each factory their curd must grind,
To blend harmonious in one
This great cheese of mighty span,
And uniform in quality
A glorious reality.
At London, Thames is a broad stream
Which was the scene of a sad theme.
A fragile steamer there did play
O’ercrowded on a Queen’s Birthday,
While all on board was bright and gay;
But soon, ’neath the cold water, lay
Naught but forms of lifeless clay.
Which made, alas! sad month of May.
Potato Bug Exterminators
When we do trace out nature’s laws,
And view effects, and muse on cause,
For the future there’s great hope
If we our eyes do only ope.
With joy they will often glisten,
If to truth one doth but listen;
But people often turn deaf ear
And what is useful will not hear.
Now for a minute, lend your luggs,
Our theme, it is potato bugs.
Misfortune sometimes is a prize,
And is a blessing in disguise;
A man with a stout wooden leg,
Through town and country he can beg.
And the people in the city,
On poor man they do take pity;
He points them to his timber leg
And tells them of his poor wife, Meg.
And if a dog tries him to bite,
With his stiff leg he doth him smite,
Or sometimes he will let him dig
His teeth into the wooden leg.
Then never more will dog delight
This poor cripple man for to bite;
Rheumatic pains they never twig,
Nor corns annoy foot of leg.
So cripple if he’s man of sense,
Finds for ill some recompense;
And though he cannot dance a jig,
He merry moves on wooden leg.
And when he only has one foot,
He needs to brush only one boot;
Through world he does jolly peg,
So cheerful with his wooden leg.
In mud or water he can stand
With his foot on the firm dry land,
For wet he doth not care a fig,
It never hurts his wooden leg.
No aches he has but on the toes
Of one foot, and but one gets froze;
He has many a jolly rig,
And oft enjoys his wooden leg.
(1828-1909)
T
he cerebral English novelist and poet focused much of his intellect on two themes: social Darwinism and the relationships and battles between the sexes; the latter theme was stimulated by the authors own bad marriage. Fame came relatively late to the prolific Meredith, who at his best could be a powerful and amusing social critic but at his worst could descend into what critics politely call “artificiality and torced wit.”
The following extremely obtuse selection is from a longer extremely obtuse poem. This particular excerpt concerns a practice followed at one time by the people of Marseilles to keep the plague from ravaging them. Each year the people would choose a sacrificial victim and use public funds to fatten him for the entire year. At the end of the year the victim would be led through the streets, jeered at by the public, then pushed off a cliff, in the hopes that the sacrifice would keep the plague at bay.
The Empty Purse A Sermon to Our Later Prodigal Son
He cancelled the ravaging Plague
With the roll of his fat off the cliff.
Do thou, with thy lean as the weapon of ink,
Though they call thee an angler who fishes the vague
And catches none too pink,
Attack one as murderous, knowing thy cause
Is the cause of community. Iterate,
Iterate, iterate, harp on the trite:
Our preacher to win is the supple in stiff:
Yet always in measure with bearing polite:
The manner of one that would expiate.
(1831-1891)
A
s a poet, Lytton is perhaps best described as being first and foremost a diplomat and statesman. The son of Parliament member and writer Edward George Bulwer Lytton, Baron of Lytton, Robert Lytton held a number of diplomatic posts throughout Europe. He topped his career with an ambassadorship in Paris, yet like most members of the diplomatic set, all the while he fervently believed his true talents lay elsewhere.
Lytton thought of himself as a Byronic poet, and he spent much of his free time churning out innumerable verses under the pseudonym “Owen Meredith.” His poems were often published in quite handsome editions with steel-cut illustrations to illuminate the more fervid passages. Most of his poems are a blend of romantic flushes, handsome mustachioed lords, heaving bosoms, and quite often a touch of the macabre.
I dream’d that I walk’d in Italy,
When the day was going down,
By a water that silently wander’d by
Thro’ an old dim-lighted town,
Till I came to a palace fair to see.
Wide open the windows were
My love at a window sat; and she
Beckon’d me up the stair.…
When I came to the little rose-colour’d room,
From the curtains out flew a bat.
The window was open: and in the gloom
My love at the window sat.
She sat with her guitar on her knee,
But she was not singing a note,
For someone had drawn (ah, who could it be?)
A knife across her throat.
The Vampyre
I found a corpse, with golden hair,
Of a maiden seven months dead.
But the face, with the death in it, still was fair,
And the lips with their love were red.
Rose-leaves on a snow-drift shed,
Blood-drops by Adonis bled,
Doubtless were not so red.
….
I would that this woman’s head
Were less golden about the hair:
I would her lips were less red,
And her face less deadly fair.
For this is the worst to hear—
How came that redness there?
’T is my heart, be sure, she eats for her food;
And it makes one’s whole flesh creep
To think that she drinks and drains my blood
Unawares, when I am asleep.
How else could those red-lips keep
Their redness so damson-deep?
There’s a thought like a serpent, slips
Ever into my heart and head,—
There are plenty of women, alive and human,
One might woo, if one wished, and wed—
Women with hearts, and brains,—ay, and lips
Not so very terribly red.
