Poetry Sunday - On Poetry That Doth Not Rhyme

On Poetry That Doth Not Rhyme

Deliver me from wasted time
On poetry that doth not rhyme,
And even worse, I prithee ban
Unruly verse that doth not scan.
Presumptuous poets place their faith
In unctuous freedom's flair to saith
Whatever shard doth pierce their head
Without regard to theme or thread.
For florid, free-form composition
Invokes esprit with erudition
To breach beyond harmonious life
Unleashing catastrophic strife
Upon the page, whence tortuous hour
Again I wage uncertain scour,
Unmeasured, of prosodic scraps
In hopes rhapsodic tenor maps
Missed metered lines so broke I rue
The reader-writer pas de deux.
Shake, break, (sigh) concentrate!
'Tis prose so lithe, but such a weight,
Where any line may stop or start
At any length
'cause
   fine
by
art.
Unfettered by constraint, their muse
Reins no restraint to feign, confuse,
And all the sundry parts of speech
Are numbly scattered out of reach
Of any sense I can decipher
Without the patience of a lifer.
The best lack all conviction
Apart from thwacking diction.
The worst have artfully a plan
That only God can understand,
And need eternity's extent
To finally agree what's meant.
I know, there's Yeats and Wallace Stevens,
A few more greats who have their reasons,
But genius hath laid bad example
For would-be bards to gad and trample
Nature, disadvantaged pressed
By thought not oft, nor well express'd.

In rhyme no words are left to roam.
Companionship doth lead them home.
None indiscriminately stroll
Aimlessly without a goal.
All poets should consider God
Obeys our laws, and yet we're awed
By lyric power, boundless grace
From fragrant flower to starlit space.
So if you freely write obscura,
I suggest that you secure a
Rhyming dict. and ruling meter
Stick with discipline, and either
Stop, or practice rod and fettered
Laws, like God, until you're better!