Jovana’s Reviews > The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse > Status Update

While eating dinner, this dear little child
Was choked on a piece of beef.
Doctors came, tried their skill awhile,
But none could give relief…

“Lord Byron” was an Englishman
A poet I believe,
His first works in old England
Was poorly received.
Perhaps it was “Lord Byron’s” fault
And perhaps it was not.
His life was full of misfortunes,
Ah, strange was his lot.

Thus, if a Government agrees to give,
Whenever Public Companies are formed,
To each a dividend – say, six per cent
Per annum for a certain fixèd time,
And for security inspects accounts –
Then, of the profits which each yieldeth more
Than the same dividend of six per cent,
Two-thirds the Government itself shall claim,
The other third remaining to afford
The Company an extra dividend.

Thro’ the thick vagueness of the vaporous night,
From the dark alley, with a clouded light,
Two rheumy, melancholy lampions flare.
They are the eyes of the Police.
[...]
Thro’ the doorway slunk
A peaky pinch’d up child with frighten’d face,
Important witness in some murder case
About to come before the magistrate
To-morrow.

When I came to the little rose-colour’d room,
From the curtains out flew a bat.
The window was open: and in the gloom
My love at the window sat.

She sat with her guitar on her knee,
But she was not singing a note,
For someone had drawn (ah, who could it be?)
A knife across her throat.

Many mellow Cydonian suckets,
Sweet apples, anthosmial, divine,
From the ruby-rimmed beryline buckets,
Star-gemmed, lily-shaped, hyaline:
Like the sweet golden goblet found growing
On the wild emerald cucumber-tree,
Rich, brilliant, like chrysoprase glowing,
Was my beautiful Rosalie Lee.

My question eagerly did I renew,
“How is it that you live, and what is it you do?”
He with a smile did then his words repeat;
And said, that, gathering leeches, far and wide
He travelled; stirring thus his feet
The waters of the pools where they abide.
“Once I could meet with them on every side;
But they have dwindled long by slow decay;
Yet still I persevere, and find them where I may.”

"His faults, if they can be so called, were predicting national ruin on small provocation and believing all who differed from him politically to be enemies of God and society."

A modern critic has well observed that when Burns unwisely discards the vernacular his efforts resemble “nothing so much as a bather whose clothes have been stolen.”

Something one day occurr’d about a bill
That was not drawn with true mercantile skill,
And I was ask’d and authorised to go
To seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co.;