"athro' the cramped veins/Faster than dolphins do o'ershoot the tide/Cours'd by the yawning shark"

[larryhammer]

Oh dear. Or even, oh dear oh dear:

The claws remain, but worms, wind, rain, and heat
Have sifted out the substance of thy feet.

The lines are bad enough on their own, but as the conclusion of an otherwise passable sonnet? A crashing THUD indeed. And yet I find it anthologized more than once.

(In case you're wondering about his name, yes, he's an older brother of Alfred the Tennyson.)

---L.

Subject quote from "Joseph and His Brethren," Charles Jeremiah Wells.

Comments

[puddleshark.livejournal.com]

Ouch. Oh, ouch. *winces*

Maybe they couldn't get the other Tennyson?

[larryhammer]

This is the one who was coauthor of Alfred the Tennyson's first book, Poems by Two Brothers. There was another brother, Frederick, who also poeticized, to even more minor effect, so I don't know that calling him in would have helped.

---L.