Punch magazine would personify graveyard miasma, in doggerel, as 'The Vampyre (NO SUPERSTITION)', ('To work vengeance and woe is his mission of dread. Upon those mid the living who bury their dead').
Literary critics called it doggerel, but ordinary folk bought hundreds of thousands of copies.According to his grandson Andrew Studdert Kennedy, who has followed the family tradition of priestly service, Woodbine Willie was himself profoundly affected by four years in the trenches.
What seems to us the doggerel of any modern cemetery may seem well said, or at least quaint, to those who read it (acid rain permitting, which is unlikely) in two centuries' time.
The doggerel itself was silly, but the earned intimacy of the group felt startlingly sincere.
Who is being parodied in the following snippets of noble doggerel?Had I but Strength enough and time Thy boldness Lady were no crime.
Or maybe not.Certainly most epitaph verse of earlier days, when it's not doggerel, is middling stuff at best, probably composed by an educated amateur for the occasion; if indeed it is not taken from "pattern books" used, or misused, by the stonemasons.
Their mischievous appearance belies their status as one of Britain's top predators.Seamus Heaney, Mary O'Malley and Ted Hughes have all devoted elegant doggerel to these creatures.
The anodyne doggerel that resulted is no better (and certainly no worse) than other countries' national anthems.
A slab of sandstone has been laid on the ppile, lovingly engraved with doggerel: "The finest of both Scots and English fell at Bannockburn They fought again at Flodden Field, And also at Culloden.
In the words of a piece of doggerel at the time, "In five minutes flat, we were blown to hell/Nearly blew us right back to Australia .The story of Gallipoli and the Anzacs, the name given to members of the Australia New Zealand Army Corps, became a legend in Australia (and indeed in New Zealand, which lost 2,700 men).
It includes almost every known poetic metre, from doggerel through terza rima to six-foot trimetre (a line of verse consisting of three measures), and a number of styles ranging from Greek tragedy through medieval mystery, baroque allegory, Renaissance masque, and commedia dell'arte to something akin to the modern revue.
