There was a young lady from Bude
Who went for a swim in the lake
A man in a punt
Stuck an oar in her ear
And said, “You can’t swim here, it’s private.”
— Anonymous
Poems
Lipogram Pangram
This verse is a combined lipogram and pangram: Each stanza omits the letter e but includes every other letter of the alphabet:
A jovial swain should not complain
Of any buxom fair,
Who mocks his pain and thinks it gain
To quiz his awkward air.Quixotic boys who look for joys
Quixotic hazards run;
A lass annoys with trivial toys,
Opposing man for fun.A jovial swain might rack his brain,
And tax his fancy’s might;
To quiz is vain, for ’tis most plain
That what I say is right.
— W.S. Walsh, Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities, 1892
“A Sonnet on a Monkey”
O lovely O most charming pug
Thy graceful air and heavenly mug
The beauties of his mind do shine
And every bit is shaped so fine
Your very tail is most divine
Your teeth is whiter than the snow
You are a great buck and a bow
Your eyes are of so fine a shape
More like a christian’s than an ape
His cheeks is like the rose’s blume
Your hair is like the raven’s plume
Your nose’s cast is of the roman
He is a very pretty woman
I could not get a rhyme for roman
And was obliged to call him woman.
— Marjory Fleming, age 8 (1803-1811)
Clerihews
A clerihew is a four-line humorous verse about a well-known person. They’re named for Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who invented them, and they get pretty erudite, for some reason:
Sir Karl Popper
Perpetrated a whopper
When he boasted to the world that he and he alone
Had toppled Rudolf Carnap from his Vienna Circle throne.
(by Armand T. Ringer)
Sir Christopher Wren
Said, “I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls,
Say I am designing St Paul’s.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Lived upon venison;
Not cheap, I fear,
Because venison’s dear.
(credited to Louis Untermeyer)
George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.
The world’s densest clerihew was composed, over breakfast, by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, in honor of New Yorker poetry editor Howard Moss. It manages to rhyme the names of three people in four lines:
To the Poetry Editor of the New Yorker
Is Robert Lowell
Better than Noël
Coward,
Howard?
Cadaeic Cadenza
Opening excerpt from “Cadaeic Cadenza,” a short story written in 1996 by Mike Keith:
One
A Poem: A Raven
Midnights so dreary, tired and weary,
Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap — the weirdest tap!
An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber’s antedoor.
“This,” I whispered quietly, “I ignore.” …
If you write out the number of letters in each word, they form the first 3,834 digits of pi.
Seeing Stars
Copernicus, that learned wight,
The glory of his nation,
With draughts of wine refreshed his sight,
And saw the Earth’s rotation;
Each planet then its orb described,
The Moon got under way, sir;
These truths from nature he imbibed
For he drank his bottle a day, sir!
— From “The Astronomer’s Drinking Song,” in Augustus De Morgan’s Budget of Paradoxes, 1866
“It Means Just What I Choose It to Mean”
Do you recognize this passage?
Homme petit d’homme petit, s’attend, n’avale
Homme petit d’homme petit, à degrés de bègues folles
Anal deux qui noeuds ours, anal deux qui noeuds s’y mènent
Coup d’un poux tome petit tout guetteur à gaine
No? Try reading it aloud.
Cognitive scientists use it to illustrate the complexity of human communications.
“We have seen thee, Queen of Cheese …”
Among bad poets, James McIntyre (1828-1906) became known as “the Chaucer of Cheese” for his pastoral odes to Ontario and its dairy culture:
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.
McIntyre was remarkably bad, but can he compete with the worst of all time? Yes, declared the mayor of Ingersoll: “He was every bit as bad as McGonagall — and a lot less talented.”
Dorothy Parker and Ogden Nash
Dorothy Parker wrote:
Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.
Ogden Nash responded:
A girl who is bespectacled
She may not get her nectackled
But safety pins and bassinets
Await the girl who fassinets.
“An Orthographic Lament”
If an S and an I and an O and a U
With an X at the end spell Su;
And an E and a Y and an E spell I,
Pray what is a speller to do?
Then, if also an S and an I and a G
And an HED spell side,
There’s nothing much left for a speller to do
But to go and commit siouxeyesighed.
— Charles Follen Adams