In this lecture I propose to explain how comic poetry is written.
Comic poetry, as I think I pointed out in my last lecture, is much more difficult than serious poetry, because there are all sorts of rules. In serious poetry there are practically no rules, and what rules there are may be shattered with impunity as soon as they become at all inconvenient. Rhyme, for instance. A well-known Irish poet once wrote a poem which ran like this:
"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 organising 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).