Pegasus Descending: A Treasury of the Best Bad Poems in English, edited by James Camp, XJ Kennedy and Keith Waldrop (Collier Books, New York, 1971), does what the label says, and brings us bad poetry at its most entertaining. The editors' witty head-notes and the assorted cartoons of a charmingly overweight, daft-looking Pegasus add to the pleasure. Extracts are trimly selected, and Kennedy, endearingly, includes an early effort of his own. Whether fustian or flimsy, homely or highfalutin', these bad poems seem overwhelmingly innocent, and their unselfconscious comedy provokes a merry grin rather than a groan or a yawn.
The range is broad – from irredeemable doggerelist William McGonagall to the great and good in their wobblier moments – Browning, Wordsworth, Hardy and Emily Dickinson among them. The editors have a brilliant nose for rubbish, but, now and again, the cautious reader may be lured back to a poem to wonder if it really was as bad as all that.
At first, I was almost knocked unconscious by the hammer-blows of repetition in this week's poem "Wind" by Sydney Dobell. Then I gave it another chance. I imagined hearing it recited in a flickeringly gas-lit auditorium by Sir Henry Irving, the actor who once reduced Bram Stoker to a state of collapse with his rendition of "The Dream of Eugene Aram". And I wondered if "Wind" might not qualify as an enjoyably spine-chilling, though probably inescapably comic, Victorian performance poem.
Dobell, a prolific writer, was one of a group of poets dubbed the Spasmodic School (other members included Alexander Smith, Gerald Massey and Ebenezer Jones). The characteristics of their style have been variously described: "violent meter, egoistic disregard for community", and, according to Coventry Patmore, "tawdriness, bombast and imbecility".
Some critics have been kinder. Jason R Rudy writes in Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics that "Rhythm for Dobell expresses metonymically the physiological conditions of the human body – its pulses either harmonise with or strain against the throbbing of our physical beings – and poets communicate most readily through a reader's sympathetic and unmediated experience of these rhythmic impulses. Only with the Spasmodic poets does the physiological shock of electricity approach literal enactment in poetic form."
"Wind" is perhaps best read as a gothic sound-poem. At the core of each stanza, there seems to be the hint of an unfolding story – a ghost story. By Dobell's vague standards of coherent narrative, this one is intelligible. It builds by means of a series of impressions, from some initial scene-setting ("winter stark"/ "level dark") to "the mystery/ Of the blasted tree" and then, after the de rigueur owl (well, owlet), a horrid materialisation, finally and dramatically evoked as "the white sight". Of course, the poem could simply be a depiction of a wild, moonlit night, and all the horrors could be natural phenomena, de-familiarised. But I like to think that Dobell's wold had a grisly secret.
Meanwhile, the wind relentlessly howls "On the wold, the wold, the wold!" The repetition divests the word of meaning, but does it divest the reader of interested attention? Is "Wind" really a bad poem or a curious little gem? And, whatever you think of "Wind", are there any Sydney Dobell poems that you feel should qualify him for a place in the serious anthologies, instead of those dedicated to the "best bad verse?"
Wind
Oh the wold, the wold,
Oh the wold, the wold!
Oh the winter stark,
Oh the level dark,
On the wold, the wold, the wold!
Oh the wold, the wold,
Oh the wold, the wold!
Oh the mystery
Of the blasted tree
On the wold, the wold, the wold!
Oh the wold, the wold,
Oh the wold, the wold!
Oh the owlet's croon
To the haggard moon,
To the waning moon,
On the wold, the wold, the wold!
Oh the wold, the wold,
Oh the wold, the wold!
Oh the fleshless stare,
Oh the windy hair,
On the wold, the wold, the wold!
Oh the wold, the wold,
Oh the wold, the wold!
Oh the cold sigh,
Oh the hollow cry,
The lean and hollow cry,
On the wold, the wold, the wold!
Oh the wold, the wold,
Oh the wold, the wold!
Oh the white sight,
Oh the shuddering night,
The shivering shuddering night,
On the wold, the wold, the wold!
