Very Bad Poetry (12 page)

    … I watch the sanitary state,
Jot down of deaths the annual rate,
And each new epidemic greet
Until my system I complete
Of tropical statistics.

Of those with whom I laughed away
On Lea’s fair banks the idle day,
*
Whose love would ne’er my breast allow
To hold concealed the thoughts that now
   Within my heart are pent
Who hung upon my every breath,
Of those dear friends I mourn the death
   Of forty-five per cent.
And Harry Gray, my soul’s delight,
The brave, the eloquent, the bright,
   The versatile, the shifty,
Stretched hopeless on his dying bed,
With failing strength and aching head,
In cholera’s malignant phase,—
Ah! woe is me,—will shortly raise
   The average to fifty.

And when, before the rains in June,
The mercury went up at noon,
To nine-and-ninety in the shade,
I every hour grew more afraid
   That doctor Fayrer right is
In hinding to my wife that those
Inflammatory symptoms rose
   From latent Hepatitis.
I’ll, ere another week goes by,
For my certificate apply,
   And sail home invalided:
Since, if I press an early bier,
The deaths from Liver in the year,
Compared with those produced by Sun,
Will (fearful thought!) have then by one
   Their ratio exceeded.

In days of old, certain patriots bold,
   When England grew pedantic,
Unfurled to the gale the Mayflower’s sail
   And ferried o’er the Atlantic.

On Plymouth rock was landed the stock
   With modest oriflamb
Who framed the state we perpetuate,
   Entitled our
Uncle Sam.

The infant grew, as infants do,
   Into a youthful nation;
When the English yoke began to choke
   And it cried for emancipation.

Then England thought, as England ought,
   We’re losing by relaxation;
We’ll keep them down by oppression’s frown
   And the grinding heel—
taxation.

Those patriots old, so we are told,
   Didn’t like
tax
on their tea;
So they threw it away in Boston Bay,
   For the mermaids down in the sea.

Then John Bull came across the main
   To stop this Yankee row.…
But Washington George, the man in charge,
   Before he began to strike,
Held up his saber and said, “Kind neighbor,
   Whichever end you like.”

So one hot July day John Hancock did say,
   To a large continental audience;
I’ve a Yankee notion to make a motion
   For Declaration of Independence.

When, in human events, with good intents,
   Two nations are tired of sticking;
If one has the grit to make the split,
   There’s no use in the other’s kicking.

We may be the scion of the “British Lion”
   But listen to my harangue:—
The American
crow
will let ’em know
   We can run our own
shebang.

That great Declaration made by the nation
   Tells the reason why,
With great demonstration and more perspiration,
   We celebrate Fourth of July.

The Worst Poem Ever Written
in the English Language

I
t is no easy task to designate one very bad poem as the absolute epitome of awfulness. But in going through hundreds of selections, one poem stood out—“A Tragedy”—which, indeed, it was. Our opinion was shared by the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain, an organization dedicated to following and celebrating failure, as well as by a motley assortment of friends, writers, and critics.

The poet who inflicted this work on the world was Theophile Marzials, a poet/librarian with a flair for the melodramatic. Born in Belgium in 1850, educated in Switzerland, and finding employment in England, Marzials had long blond hair, a baritone voice, and a continental-sized ego. He once interrupted a hushed library room by loudly declaiming: “Am I not the darling of the British Museum Reading Room?” He also had an enthusiastic propensity for giving impromptu public recitals of his works. The reaction of the public can only be guessed at.

A Tragedy
by
Theophile Marzials

*
[Had the Lord informed Moses and Joshua that the sun is the centre of the Solar System, and that there are seven primary and eighteen secondary planets revolving around it; and that Jupiter is more than a thousand times larger than this earth, and has four moons; and that Saturn is several hundred times the size of our globe, and has seven moons; then these favourites of the Lord might have imparted this information to the human race as an important portion of divine revelation; the truths of which would have been confirmed by subsequent discoveries; and the Christian church would not have persecuted people for defending those truths made known by the demonstration of philosophers.]

*
[One man of you shall chase a thousand, for the Lord your God he is that fighteth for you. Thus saith the book of Joshua, xxiii, 10. And in the book of Judges we find that one man actually slew a thousand men, with no other weapon than a bone, picked up on the occasion. Such doings in our time would be considered very strange.]

*
[It was somewhat singular that so great a conqueror as Joshua should have been so distressed at the loss of thirty-six of his own men. But so it was; he rent his clothes, and fell to the earth upon his face.… he and all the elders of Israel expressed their grief by putting dust upon their heads. This custom of the Lord’s people appears to us as rather singular. In our time people are more inclined to express their feelings of grief and perplexity by scratching the head than by putting dust or dirt upon it.]

*
The former East Indian College of Haileybury stood within a mile of the river Lea.

Kathryn and Ross Petras are a brother and sister who fondly recall laughing at each other’s early poetic efforts, most notably Ross’s “Pinky Bee,” which even by first-grade standards was lamentable, and Kathy’s adolescent “Man-Smell,” which is fortunately lost. Nevertheless, Kathy went on to win several awards for her poetry in college; while Ross won commendations for writing non-poetic bureaucratese for the U.S. Department of State. Both now enjoy writing books for a living, which include
World Access,
a compendium of world culture, and
The 776 Stupidest Things Ever Said,
a best-selling collection of verbal foolishness.