There was a little girl and she had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good she was very very good ,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
(That’s how I remember it. Googling tellws me it’s slightly a misquote)
By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
My mother can do the whole poem! I know it up to about the same point you stopped at.
My grandfather read Longfellow. He only went to school through the eighth grade, but never stopped reading.
We had portions of Longfellow’s Evangeline in my eigth grade English lit book, and I will be always grateful for it, because that poem saved my butt one day.
We had an assignment to do a dramatic reading, in front of the class. I forgot all about it, and the only book I had with me was our textbook. While trying to pretend I was paying attention to the other readers I flipped through the book, desperately seeking anything that would be suitable. So Evangeline it was, the part from the end where, as an elderly nun, she finds Gabriel in the poorhouse hospital. Perhaps the throb in my voice was from the text, actually it was desperation.
The teacher sat at the back, making notes as we spoke and writing comments. I couldn’t believe that I got an A- , with the comment “Obviously well prepared”
Will I embarrass myself by admitting that I’ve always liked Little Orphant Annie ? It has to be read aloud, with considerable emphasis on each “Don’t! Watch! Out!”
Jessie Pope wrote some popular yet excruciatingly jingoistic and simplistic verse urging her countrymen to take up arms and join the jolly, jolly good time of the Great War, such as Who’s For the Game?, - an excerpt:
“Who’s for the game, the biggest that’s played,
The red crashing game of a fight?
Who’ll grip and tackle the job unafraid?
And who thinks he’d rather sit tight?”
Pope inspired actual poet Wilfred Owen who actually fought and later died in the Great War to write the brutal, haunting and actually good answer poem Dulce Et Decorum Est, which was initially dedicated to her and later cryptically dedicated “To a certain poetess.”
It ends even worse than it begins, thusly:
Better still, that effort was the middle work of an unplanned *trilogy *about the same bridge:
[QUOTE=wikipedia]
McGonagall had previously written a poem in praise of the Tay Bridge: “The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay” “With your numerous arches and pillars in so grand array”. Once the new replacement bridge had been built, without the least feeling of irony, he proceeded to compose an ode to the new construction: “An Address to the New Tay Bridge” “Strong enough all windy storms to defy”.
[/QUOTE]
Anyone who dares to rhyme “buttresses” with “men confesses” is alright by me.
Re: Jessie Pope, I should also add The Call. An excerpt:
Who’s for the trench—
Are you, my laddie?
Who’ll follow French—
Will you, my laddie?
Who’s fretting to begin,
Who’s going out to win?
And who wants to save his skin—
Do you, my laddie?
That is true of all of these poem. The recitation is half of the effect, and folks back then liked it if you put some oomph into it. Not like the Steven Wright school of deadpan poetry reading popular recently.
I’m a bit apprehensive here, about offending Australian participants on the board; but I’ll go ahead and mention the much-loved late 19th / early 20th century Australian bush balladeer, A.B. “Banjo” Paterson. It would be unfair to call him across-the-board “incredibly bad” – he wrote some stirring stuff – but I find parts of his output highly groan-worthy.
This largely because, of all the rhymesters I’ve ever come across, he’s pretty well the greatest practitioner of utterly dreadful forced rhymes. I recall a ballad of his, concerning knockabout goings-on involving a travelling circus and the country towns of Narrabri and Gunnedah. It begins approximately (this from memory):
“The circus swooped down on Narrabri town,
And since Narrabri people quite moneyed are,
They decided to stay for a week and a day
Before they moved onward to Gunnedah.”
And as the piece goes on, the rhymes become more and more contrived and contorted.
Also, “Banjo” has a habit of frequently ending lines with “self” – “yourself”, “myself”, etc. The trouble with this, is that English has very few rhymes for “self” – one is pretty well restricted to “shelf”, “elf”, and “pelf”(=money). So he goes ahead and works one of those into the verse, in order to get the rhyme – which leads to some very stilted wording.
There was a news story a few months ago about a Victorian poet who was quite popular despite being bad. Apparently some graduate student decided to do a thesis on them, and discovered the reason for the popularity- towards the end of the big thick book of bad poetry was a section filled with good pornography…
Riley was called (and called himself) the Children’s Poet. Read “Little Orphant Annie” or “Nine Little Goblins” to a group of kids and they’ll want to hear it again.
No, by me! You can help me straighten out my Longfellow!
Has anyone here ever read The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse?
:dubious: If you know what he means. Watch out, Nzinga.
Hey! I used to like his stuff, even though it was maudlin and morose. It worked better when Glen Yarbrough put it to song.
One of my college English Lit texts, an anthology of mid to late 17th-century poetry, commented that Francis Quarles was an example of the total inadequacy of popular taste because he was the most popular poet of the age, far surpassing Milton, Marvell and Dryden.
The Professor did not assign any of Quarles’ work to read, and I was never curious enough examine them on my own until a few minutes ago:
A Divine Rapture
*E’EN like two little bank-dividing brooks,
That wash the pebbles with their wanton streams,
And having ranged and search’d a thousand nooks,
Meet both at length in silver-breasted Thames,
Where in a greater current they conjoin:
So I my Best-beloved’s am; so He is mine.
E’en so we met; and after long pursuit,
E’en so we joined; we both became entire;
No need for either to renew a suit,
For I was flax, and He was flames of fire:
Our firm-united souls did more than twine;
So I my Best-beloved’s am; so He is mine.
If all those glittering Monarchs, that command
The servile quarters of this earthly ball,
Should tender in exchange their shares of land,
I would not change my fortunes for them all:
Their wealth is but a counter to my coin:
The world 's but theirs; but my Beloved’s mine.*
Pretty dull, and seemingly homoerotic in theme, although I do recall from the college text that Quarles’ work was devotional, so the “Beloved” of this poem probably refers to Christ.
Joyce Kilmer’s Trees is universally known and pretty bad. I’m assuming his tragic death in WW1 has something to do with it’s popularity.
Etc. etc.
I have no problem imagining it being recited by Henry Gibson.
Interesting that two people have quoted the Song of Hiawatha from the third canto:
I’ve always associated “By the shores of Gitche Gumee” with the more widely-read 22nd (and last) canto:
But either way, the poem is read and remembered. “By the shores of Gitche Gumee”, “This is the forest primeval”, and “Listen my children and you shall hear” are three of the most famous lines in American poetry, and I am at a loss as to any standard by which Longfellow could be considered “forgotten”. (Except maybe to the extent that poetry itself is forgotten.)
The cause of the 20th-century total collapse of the poetry of the English language must surely lie at the door of the aesthetically fraudulent literary movement which enshrined T.S. Eliot as a master. Eliot’s attempts at high-brow verse are in fact unfathomable, inartisic pedantry.
Here are the first few lines of an effort I was exposed to in college:
GERONTION
*Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought. *
How many people here know what “the hot gates” refer to? Those he saw a certain 2005 movie don’t count.
Also, I have for over 40 years been trying to find someone who can tell me what “the salt marsh” was. The word “cutlass” and historical juxtaposition with “hot gates” brings Salamis to mind as an educated guess, especially if one discovers that “sal” is Greek for salt. Alas, Wiki informs us that “amis” in Greek means “in the midst of” and so “Salamis” roughly means “surrounded by salt (water)”. Maybe know-it-all Eliot, who could read innumerable languages (even if he could write decent poetry in none of them) was aware of a secondary definition for “amis” meaning “marsh.” Online English to Greek dictionaries have not helped.
Gack! Yes, I’ve got a copy of it at home somewhere…
Katz’s Deli in NYC has a sign that says “Send a salami to your boy in the Army.” I love that it’s supposed to rhyme.