User:Goustien/sandbox

Poetastery
A man was versed in rhymery; His poetry was punnery And gimmickry and devilment, While elements of eloquence He misemployed and altered so They faltered on their wordy wings, All burbling and babbling, And o'er the page did lope and trot His trope and tralatitious tricks Of euphuism intermixed With metaphor and rheticor (And anagrams and cacograms) And similes and synecdocs- Unorthodox his orthograph, And poor his craft in spouting rhymes, With vowels plied in assonance And dissonance of consonants Alliterated lawlessly While flawlessly his footage failed To innovate or deviate From iambs in tetrameter; So uniform, his measure lacked A stress and slack diversified; He versified unmanifold, He wasn't bold, he was in mode Of pounding meter rather set, Allowing neither anapest Nor dactyl, lest, all patternless, His verse should seem as doggerel Or chatterel in groggibus- And macaronic were his words; They cácophónously concurred (His accents prone to be transférred), And hackneyed tones three times recurred, Declining to redundancy, With tendency for tedium And mediocre idiom; Continuing interm'nably, Eternally a monotone, Thus on it droned and on it dragged And never lagged but weary-went, Till overspent in versiment It dropped and, choppy, sloppy, stopped.

(1977) David Bedell