We turned, as the winter-flakes fell from the cloud,
And the keen wind blew colder and colder;
And there, in his little grey coffin and shroud,
Left our darling to silently moulder.

— Henry Doman, “The Burial of the Darling,” from “The Cathedral” and Other Poems, 1864

Attend, ye fair, ye thoughtless, and ye gay!
For Mira dy’d upon the nuptial day!
The grave, cold bridegroom! clasp’d her in his arms,
And kindred worms destroyed her pleasing charms.

— Henry More, “Night Thoughts,” from An Elegaic Poem Amidst the Ruins of an Abbey, 1803

I tell you I’m the youngest son of five;
And three lie in their gore
Down by the great hall-door,
And Fred and I are all that are alive.

— John Stanyan Bigg, “The Huguenot’s Doom,” from Shifting Scenes, and Other Poems, 1862

Yet to the mariner, when tempest tost,
Thy presence brings to him but sore dismay;
Contact with thee, all hope were surely lost,
Death then engulphs his helpless prey.

— William Igglesden, “To an Iceberg in the Southern Ocean,” from Poetical Miscellanea, 1858

S.L. Francis’ 1760 “Elegy on Colonel Robert Montgomery Written on the Fatal Spot Where the Lamentable Duel Transpired” ends with the line “Submerged he lies, co-wretched am I now.” “All poets write bad poetry,” wrote Umberto Eco. “Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.”

There was a young man from Honshu
Who tried limericks in haiku,
But

— Doug Holyman, in Word Ways, May 2007

“Tribes of the Scale Wings,” an appallingly terrible poem by Edward Newman, 1857:

Let us take a stroll, my Laura,
Down Farm Lane and to the sedge pond,
Where thy father often fishes
For the pretty water beetles,
Grapii and branchiatus,
Hubneri and marginalis,
Agilis and punctulatus,
Ater, Sturmii and fusous,
Pretty Colymbetes fuscus,
That my Laura once caught flying.
Thence we’ll turn to rural Burnt Ash.
Haply we may meet with Stainton,
With his ardent class around him.
As we walk I’ll try and teach thee
Something more about the Scale Wings.
Lepidoptera, or Scale Wings,
Are the butterflies and night moths,
And we know them by the scaled wings,
And the mouth, so like a watch spring,
Coiled up underneath their faces …

[this goes on for nine pages]

… But their structure, so abnormal,
Serves to indicate the sequence
Of the Tipulæ or Craneflies,
Which we must ere long consider.
This discourse on Scale Wings ended,
I will pick these purple vetches,
Purple vetches, Vicia cracca,
And I’ll twine them in a chaplet,
And the Queen of Scale Wings crown thee.

Newman’s collection The Insect Hunters contains corresponding odes to the Diptera, Hymenoptera, Coleoptera, Stegoptera, Neuroptera, Hemiptera, and Orthoptera, including an affectionate nod to earwigs.

Robert Peter wrote these lines on March 23, 1838, on leaving London for Jamaica. Christopher Adams named Peter one of the worst English poets, presumably for the immortal last line.

O! wherefore pensive heaves that sigh?
Why is thy face o’ercast with sorrow?
Thy throbbing bosom heaving high;
And wherefore should thy grief-dimmed eye
That tint of melancholy borrow?

‘Tis thus with me; I cherish dear
Each fond memorial of affection;
My heart the impress still shall wear —
Though fate doth now asunder tear
Those ties, the cause of my dejection.

For soon the dark, deep, rolling waves
Of wild Atlantic shall us sever;
And while around me ocean raves,
Still warm remembrance friendship craves;
Thee, M.M. Woods, forget I’ll never!

Word Ways reader Art Benjamin found this limerick on a blackboard at Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s:

First let me say that I’m cursed.
I’m a poet who gets time reversed.
Reversed time,
Gets who poet a I’m,
Cursed I’m that say me let first.

No author was given.

When Germany occupied Denmark in 1940, physicist Piet Hein published an innocent-seeming poem:

Losing one glove
is certainly painful,
but nothing compared to the pain
of losing one,
throwing away the other,
and finding the first one again.

The German censors let it go, not understanding its meaning — that while enduring occupation was bad, ceasing to resist would be worse. “It said that what happens to you from outside is less important than how you take it,” he explained later. “The Danes knew what I meant.”

In later years Hein cultivated a talent for such tiny aphoristic poems, which he called “grooks”:

Problems worthy
of attack
prove their worth
by hitting back.

There is
one art,
no more,
no less:
to do
all things
with art-
lessness.

The road to wisdom? — Well, it’s plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.

Put up in a place
where it’s easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T.T.T.
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb,
it’s well to remember that
Things Take Time.

In all he wrote more 7,000 grooks, which have become a part of Scandinavian culture. “I cannot really say where my activity as a scientist ends and where my activity as a man of letters begins,” he said. “Whether I am writing a poem or solving some technical problem, I think the same.”