Really thoroughly bad verse (as Mr. Hilaire Belloc pointed out in an
essay) has a magic and an attraction all its own. It has (he said)
“something of the poignant and removed from common experience which
you get also in poetry. Great pits strike one with horror, as do the
mountains with their sublimity.”
A philosophic friend of ours, whose dolorous task it is to examine
manuscripts for a large publishing house, sent us the other day a
collection of verses that had been submitted to his firm. We have had
considerable diversion in examining them; though compositions of this
sort lead one also to melancholy. It is sad to think that the accident
of rhyme, which has been the occasion of so much verbal loveliness, has
also been responsible for so many atrocities.
We shall not say who wrote the verses in question, except that he lives
in a Southern State, but we will quote a few stanzas from a poem called
“Love’s Progress.” After several pages describing the sorrows of a pair
of lovers, we arrive at this:
They broke to break their breaking breach,
Which both have caused, because of each
Failing to procure, or reach,
The longing goal they did beseech.
They sought to seek their seeking truth,
Which all do crave, and never boot;
They kept their cadence to a flute,
Which only wisdom seeks to mute.
They slid to slide their sliding sleigh
Toward goals, but met a fray;
And, striking, struck the striking broil;
And found themselves to winds a spoil.
They swung to swing their swinging life
To higher spheres and lusty fife;
But flung against the sturdy cliff,
And sunk beneath the brutal grief.
They shed their shedding tears in vain,
Fruitless as the dismal rain;
And pined their pine, and pined it more;
And reaped their crop they sowed to store.
Defying fies have they defied;
Lying lies have they belied;
Brisky thought did both deride;
Happy hope had both denied!
You see how low rhyme can bring a man.
Of the following, our friend the publisher’s reader observes: “Alas,
poor Henley--’twas an excellent fellow: I knew him well!”