Very Bad Poetry by Kathryn Petras Read Free Book Online Page A

a powerful and amusing social critic but at his worst could descend into what critics politely call “artificiality and torced wit.”
    The following extremely obtuse selection is from a longer extremely obtuse poem. This particular excerpt concerns a practice followed at one time by the people of Marseilles to keep the plague from ravaging them. Each year the people would choose a sacrificial victim and use public funds to fatten him for the entire year. At the end of the year the victim would be led through the streets, jeered at by the public, then pushed off a cliff, in the hopes that the sacrifice would keep the plague at bay.
from
The Empty Purse A Sermon to Our Later Prodigal Son
    He cancelled the ravaging Plague
   With the roll of his fat off the cliff.
Do thou, with thy lean as the weapon of ink,
Though they call thee an angler who fishes the vague
   And catches none too pink,
Attack one as murderous, knowing thy cause
Is the cause of community. Iterate,
Iterate, iterate, harp on the trite:
Our preacher to win is the supple in stiff:
Yet always in measure with bearing polite:
The manner of one that would expiate.

OWEN MEREDITH (ROBERT LYTTON, EARL OF LYTTON)
(1831-1891)
    A s a poet, Lytton is perhaps best described as being first and foremost a diplomat and statesman. The son of Parliament member and writer Edward George Bulwer Lytton, Baron of Lytton, Robert Lytton held a number of diplomatic posts throughout Europe. He topped his career with an ambassadorship in Paris, yet like most members of the diplomatic set, all the while he fervently believed his true talents lay elsewhere.
    Lytton thought of himself as a Byronic poet, and he spent much of his free time churning out innumerable verses under the pseudonym “Owen Meredith.” His poems were often published in quite handsome editions with steel-cut illustrations to illuminate the more fervid passages. Most of his poems are a blend of romantic flushes, handsome mustachioed lords, heaving bosoms, and quite often a touch of the macabre.
Going Back Again
    I dream’d that I walk’d in Italy,
   When the day was going down,
By a water that silently wander’d by
   Thro’ an old dim-lighted town,
    Till I came to a palace fair to see.
   Wide open the windows were
My love at a window sat; and she
   Beckon’d me up the stair.…
    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.
from
The Vampyre
    I found a corpse, with golden hair,
   Of a maiden seven months dead.
But the face, with the death in it, still was fair,
   And the lips with their love were red.
   Rose-leaves on a snow-drift shed,
   Blood-drops by Adonis bled,
   Doubtless were not so red.
    ….
    I would that this woman’s head
   Were less golden about the hair:
I would her lips were less red,
   And her face less deadly fair.
   For this is the worst to hear—
   How came that redness there?
    ’T is my heart, be sure, she eats for her food;
   And it makes one’s whole flesh creep
To think that she drinks and drains my blood
   Unawares, when I am asleep.
   How else could those red-lips keep
   Their redness so damson-deep?
    There’s a thought like a serpent, slips
   Ever into my heart and head,—
There are plenty of women, alive and human,
   One might woo, if one wished, and wed—
Women with hearts, and brains,—ay, and lips
   Not so very terribly red.
    The following country-house soliloquy is also typically Meredithian. In this one the bard tries to deftly and lightly contrast the failed love affair of an insect (of the midge genus) with that of a man at a party who has just been deserted by a brilliant woman.
from
Midges
    She is talking aesthetics, the dear