Doggerel

by Peter Dreyer (February 2025)

———-Then, in a free and lofty strain,
————-Our broken Tunes we thus repair;
———-And we answer them again,
————-Running division on the panting Air:
————-To celebrate this feast of sense,
————-As free from scandal as offense.
———————-—Ben Jonson, Poetaster, act 4, scene 5
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“Doggerel” in French is vers de mirliton,
In Spanish, it’s copia de ciego.
In German, Knittelvers—
An Arzneimittel [drug] one fears!
Yet worse, in Dutch, it’s kreupelrijm,
Which plainly gives away the game!
It’s poesia burlesca, though, in Portuguese,
A language ever sure to please!
In Russian, it’s нескладный
In Mandarin, 打油诗
In Japanese, ドゲレル
If you can’t tell how the last three rhyme,
I beg you not to waste our precious time,
Your frontal lobes are quite unfit to scan—
A tragic case of unpoetic man!
And should you dare dub my own verses “doggerel,”
I’ll bid you, vile poetaster, go to Hell!
“Stand not upon the order of your going
[so Macbeth commands], but go at once!”
Unworthy, as great Virgil once said,
“To teach your grandma to suck eggs,*
Much less critique artful prosody!”
Honi soit qui mal y pense.†
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[*] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teaching_grandmother_to_suck_eggs
[†] “Shame on them who think this wrong!” Motto of the Order of the Garter, the highest British chivalric order. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honi_soit_qui_mal_y_pense

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Peter Richard Dreyer is a South African American writer. He is the author of A Beast in View (London: André Deutsch), The Future of Treason (New York: Ballantine), A Gardener Touched with Genius: The Life of Luther Burbank (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan; rev. ed., Berkeley: University of California Press; new, expanded ed., Santa Rosa, CA: Luther Burbank Home & Gardens), Martyrs and Fanatics: South Africa and Human Destiny (New York: Simon & Schuster; London: Secker & Warburg), and most recently the novel Isacq (Charlottesville, VA: Hardware River Press, 2017).

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