More Badness
Reading edition
My appeal for interesting specimens of bad verse has brought me a large mass of material; but most of my correspondents seem not to realize that merely feeble and meaningless verse is so common as not to be worth preserving. The best single line I have received—sent me by a notorious dramatist who has forgotten its place of origin—is:
The beetle booms adown the glooms and bumps among the clumps;
and what promised to be the best whole poem is one that begins by rhyming “Atlantic” to “blanket.” But when I had got through it I found that my correspondent had got it out of a visitors’ book in an hotel. I really cannot count anything that has not been properly published; although I confess to being tempted by such lines as:
Farewell, farewell, bonny St. Ives, May I live to see you again, Your air preserves people’s lives And you have so little rain.
So really the best acquisition I have made is the following, the author of which I should like to discover:
In this imperfect, gloomy scene Of complicated ill, How rarely is a day serene, The throbbing bosom still! Will not a beauteous landscape bright Or music’s soothing sound, Console the heart, afford delight, And throw sweet peace around? They may; but never comfort lend Like an accomplished female friend! With such a friend the social hour In sweetest pleasure glides; There is, in female charms a power Which lastingly abides; The fragrance of the blushing rose, Its tints and splendid hue, Will, with the seasons, decompose, And pass as flitting dew; On firmer ties his joys depend Who has a faithful female friend! As orbs revolve, and years recede, And seasons onward roll, The fancy may on beauties feed With discontented soul; A thousand objects bright and fair May for a moment shine, Yet many a sigh and many a tear But mark their swift decline; While lasting joys the man attend Who has a polished female friend!
My correspondent says that he received this from a friend (perhaps a polished female friend), who did not tell him whence it was extracted. I myself have seen two lines of it before—the last two of the second stanza. They occurred in a letter I received some time ago from a clerical acquaintance who was apologizing for having got engaged. He, on inquiry, pretended (with a mendacity very rare amongst clergymen) that he had written the lines himself; but I did not believe him. The poem bears the marks of the earlier decades of the nineteenth century. Can it be by Thomas Haynes Bayly?
One interesting thing I should like to trace is a metrical version of Holy Writ containing such lines as these on Jonah:
Three dreadful days beneath the deep, In fish’s belly dark lay he. How terrible methinks his fate. May no such torment fall on me.
The most ingenious writer who contributes the “Observator” column to the Observer offers me a couple of specimens, one of which is new to me. The old one is the late Mr. Alfred Austin’s remark about Nature:
She sins upon a larger scale Because she is herself more large.
And the other, a touching narrative of a gipsy woman who fell ill, was a discovery of Andrew Lang’s:
There we leave her, There we leave her, Far from where her swarthy kindred roam, In the Scarlet Fever, Scarlet Fever, Scarlet Fever Convalescent Home.