busker

Nullo metro compositum est

["It doesn't rhyme"]

Energetic stroll around the isle, shook fist at all the ghastly building going on and the sheer hideousness of some of the mansions. Can't there be a cut-off of wealth at certain points of tastlessness, so that someone of X crassness can only do $Y,000's worth of blotting the landscape, etc?

To keep myself amused, I toyed with some metrical verse mocking free verse: :

Manners make verse no less than they make man

Asking of verse that it should rhyme and scan

And be the ground where Grace and Patience meet

On pathways trod by – say – iambic feet

Lo! Verse that scorns such gently measured tread

To be dismissed needs only to be read;

Or should it spurn the courtesy of rhyme

T’will rarely stand the briefest test of time.

Free verse is free with all its tawdry favours,

A slut whose turpitude the dimwit savours,

A strutting cock who from his dunghill crows,

Conceited from his coxcomb to his toes.

Free verse, the work of charlatans and knaves,

The shortest road to execration paves,

Yet, might it be in Heaven, we dare to hope,

That Mr. Pound is chum to Mr. Pope?