A Franciscan brother in Ireland, Friar Michael of Kildare, composed some good nonsensical poems—one of them a rigmarole in which part of the joke is the way he pretends to rhyme and then sticks in a word that does not rhyme, asking all through for admiration of his skill in verse. As a poetical joke it is curious, and shows that Brother Michael was a critic and knew the terms of his art. There are many literary games in the Middle Ages, nonsense rhymes of different sorts; they are connected with the serious art of poetry which had its own ‘toys and trifles’—such feats of skill in verse and rhyming as Chaucer shows in his Complaint of Anelida. Tricks of verse were apt to multiply as the poetic imagination failed—a substitute for poetry; but many of the strongest poets have used them occasionally. Among all the artistic games one of the most curious is where a Welsh poet (in Oxford in the fifteenth century) gives a display of Welsh poetical form with English words—to confute the ignorant Saxon who had said there was no art of poetry in Wales.
The stanza forms in the Harleian book are various, and interesting to compare with modern stanzas. There is an example of the verse which has travelled from William of Poitiers, about the year 1100, to Burns and his imitators. Modern poetry begins with William of Poitiers using the verse of Burns in a poem on Nothing—
The song I make is of no thing,
Of no one, nor myself, I sing,
Of joyous youth, nor love-longing,
Nor place, nor time;
I rode on horseback, slumbering:
There sprang this rhyme!
Two hundred years after, it is found in England—
Her eye hath wounded me, y-wisse,