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BAD VERSE
Really thoroughly bad verse (as Mr. Hilaire Belloc pointed out in an essay) has a magic and an attraction all its own. It has (he said) “something of the poignant and removed from common experience which you get also in poetry. Great pits strike one with horror, as do the mountains with their sublimity.”
A philosophic friend of ours, whose dolorous task it is to examine manuscripts for a large publishing house, sent us the other day a collection of verses that had been submitted to his firm. We have had considerable diversion in examining them; though compositions of this sort lead one also to melancholy. It is sad to think that the accident of rhyme, which has been the occasion of so much verbal loveliness, has also been responsible for so many atrocities.
We shall not say who wrote the verses in question, except that he lives in a Southern State, but we will quote a few stanzas from a poem called “Love’s Progress.” After several pages describing the sorrows of a pair of lovers, we arrive at this:
They broke to break their breaking breach,
Which both have caused, because of each
Failing to procure, or reach,
The longing goal they did beseech.
They sought to seek their seeking truth,