“Hands, do as you’re bid,
Draw the balloon of the mind
That bellies and sags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.”
This was printed in a serious paper; but if the poet had sent it up to a humorous paper (as he might well have done) the Editor would have said, “Do you pronounce it shid?” and the poet would have had no answer. You see, he started out, as serious poets do, with every intention of organizing a good rhyme for bid—or perhaps for shed—but he found this was more difficult than he expected. And then, no doubt, somebody drove all his cattle on to his croquet-lawn, or somebody else’s croquet-lawn, and he abandoned the struggle. I shouldn’t complain of that; what I do complain of is the deceitfulness of the whole thing. If a man can’t find a better rhyme than shed for a simple word like bid, let him give up the idea of having a rhyme at all; let him write—
Hands, do as you’re TOLD,
or
Into its narrow HUT (or even HANGAR).
That at least would be an honest confession of failure. But to write bid and shed is simply a sinister attempt to gain credit for writing a rhymed poem without doing it at all.
Well, that kind of thing is not allowed in comic poetry. When I opened my well-known military epic, “Riddles of the King,” with the couplet—