Rattles from under the sonnet

Press, 5 October 1985, Page 20

Rattles from under the sonnet

The Stuffed owl. An Anthology of Bad Verse. By D. B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee. Everyman, 1935. 264 pp. $9.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Eric Beardsley) Just as there is good and bad verse, so there are subdivisions of good bad verse and bad, even excruciating, bad verse. McGonagall is surely the laureate of the latter. This anthology, now in its fifth edition since it first appeared in 1930, aims slightly higher. Good bad verse is not easy to define, but (like sex) you know the difference when you see it. Its practitioners follow all the known rules of poesy, but somehow they drop a spondee in the works, they iambic pentameter alliterates and there are awful sounds from under the sonnet.

Put it, as do the compilers, this way: bad bad verse is a teeth-braced schoolgirl, as determined and powerful as she is inexperienced, executing — the word is used advisedly - Debussy on an almost blood-stained keyboard. Good bad verse is perhaps Maurice Till, all crotchets and concentration, closing a Mozart recital on the Town Hall Steinway with a rendition of “The Robin’s Return.”

Clearly, banality and bathos are of the essence for good bad verse and it helps if the poet has a reputation. Parnassus is steep, but it is also slippery; and many who have scaled the heights have slithered and slid to the base on occasion. The bigger they are the harder they fall, as perfidious rugby coaches are wont to tell the

puny, and it is somehow pleasing to observe such eminences as Dryden, Addison, Goldsmith, Burns, Southey, Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Longfellow, and Tennyson glissading downhill in this collection. Space permits only a few examples, not all by that august band. First (on the recovery of a Prince of Wales): Across the wires the gloomy message came: “He is not better; he is much the same.” A similar progress report in Samuel Carter’s “Incident in Italy”: Since when he has (replied the nurse), Been going on from bad to worse or in Wordsworth’s “Idiot Boy” The piteous news so much it shocked her, She quite forgot to send the Doctor Then there was that poor invalid gipsy There we leave her, leave her, Far from where her swarthy kindred roam, In the Scarlet Fever, Scarlet Fever Scarlet Fever Convalescent Home. but it was another of whom Tennyson wrote So passed the strong heroic soul away, And when they buried him, the little port Had seldom seen a costlier funeral Good bad verse is not all concerned with sickness and death: Oh moon, when I gaze on thy beautiful face,

Careering along through the bound’ries of space, The thought has often come into my mind, If I ever shall see thy glorious behind. There are rich pickings here for the discerning. Indeed there is only one small regret about the collection. Alexander Pope fails to make the grade. Few Christchurch people — at least those over three score years — have much time for the fellow because their mentor, Professor Freddie Sinclaire (discussed, recently on this page) made it clear to English I students at Canterbury University College in the forties that “The Rape of the Lock” and other such trifles really counted for very little. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he would intone at the start of his lecture on the poet, “I have nothing good to say about Pope — except that he was kind to his mother.” But Leigh Hunt, that cheerful, resolute an imprudent poet, editor and essayist, is well represented in the book. Perhaps the nicest couplet is his The two divinest things that man has got, A lovely woman in a rural spot. to which Coventry Patmore responded The two divinest things this world can grab A handsome woman in a hansom cab. Congenial company, a jug of wine, and selected readings from this anthology will ensure some convival evenings.