I’m in a 10der mood to-day
& feel poetic, 2;
4 fun I’ll just — off a line
& send it off 2 U.
I’m sorry you’ve been 6 O long;
Don’t B disconsol8;
But bear your ills with 42de,
& they won’t seem so gr8.
— Anonymous
Poems
Rhyming the Unrhymable
I have tried a hundred times, I guess,
To find a rhyme for month;
I have failed a hundred times, I know,
But succeeded the hundred and one-th.
There were two men a training went.
It was in December month;
One had his bayonet thrown away,
The other had his gun th-
rown away.
— Miscellaneous Notes and Queries, August 1894
High-Flown
“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” “revised by a committee of eminent preceptors and scholars”:
Shine with irregular, intermitted light, sparkle at intervals, diminutive, luminous, heavenly body.
How I conjecture, with surprise, not unmixed with uncertainty, what you are,
Located, apparently, at such a remote distance from, and at a height so vastly superior to this earth, the planet we inhabit,
Similar in general appearance and refractory powers to the precious primitive octahedron crystal of pure carbon, set in the aerial region surrounding the earth.
— William T. Dobson, Poetical Ingenuities and Eccentricities, 1882
“Epigram”
A player at blind-man’s-buff, and Sympathy,
In common, have one striking feature:
Each is, you see,
A fellow feeling for a fellow creature.
— John Augustus Miles, Poems and Chess Problems, 1882
Epigram
An amorous wag once sought the bliss,
To steal a soft and balmy kiss,
When Sylvia stampt (and some say, swore)
That he should gain the prize no more;
He smiled, and said, if ’tis such pain,
Pray, miss, return it back again.
— The Jester’s Magazine, 1767
“Indian Corn”
Another candidate for worst poem of all time. This one is by the Rev. William Cook of Salem, Mass., from his 1873 booklet Talk About Indians:
Corn, corn, sweet Indian corn,
Greenly you grew long ago.
Indian fields well to adorn,
And to parch or grind hah-ho!
Where shines the summer sun,
And plied his hoe or plough
Blessings to men have you not gone
Making food of your dough?
In England, in France and Germany
At morn, at eve, at noon
Johnnie-cake and harmony
Increase the family boon.
Limerick
Said the chemist, “I’ll take some dimethyloximidomesoralamide
And I’ll add just a dash of dimethylamidoazobensaldehyde;
But if these won’t mix,
I’ll just have to fix
Up a big dose of trisodiumpholoroglucintricarboxycide.”
Pi in Verse
— A.C. Orr, Literary Digest, 1906
Reversible Verse
As I was passing near the jail
I met a man, but hurried by.
His face was ghastly, grimly pale.
He had a gun. I wondered why
He had. A gun? I wondered … why,
His face was ghastly! Grimly pale,
I met a man, but hurried by,
As I was passing near the jail.
— J.A. Lindon
Lipogram
What’s unusual about this nursery rhyme?
Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To get her poor dog a bone,
But when she got there
The cupboard was bare
And so her poor dog had none.
It’s 30 words long but does not contain the letter I.
See also Nevermore.