"A White Rose" is charming (a quality largely absent in poetry these days), and a verse I've always had a soft spot for. Thanks for posting it.

Frayed you'll have to provide the ~ yourself for this one:

Sighed the winsome Kristina von Baer
As she pedaled with Juan through the square,
"I have never, senor,
Come this way before.
'Tis the cobblestone paving, I swear!"

Jan

Sorry to add wife beating to the list but
Burns for me;


The Henpecked Husband

Curs`d be the man, the poorest wretch in life,
The crouching vassal to a tyrant wife!
Who has no will but by her high permission,
Who has not sixpence but in her posession,
Who must to her his dear friend`s secrets tell,
Who dreads a curtain lecture worse than hell.
Were such the wife had fallen to my part,
I`d break her spirit, or I`d break her heart;
I`d charm her with the magic of a switch,
I`d kiss her maids, and kick the perverse bitch.


DC

...and also Byron`s epitaph for Lord Castlereagh.


Posterity will ne`er survey
A nobler grave than this;
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh;
Stop, traveller, and piss.

If limerick-reading is a guilty pleasure, I'm all the guiltier for writing them. These were done for a limerick contest requiring sexual content without four-letter words.


There once was a man who was spurred
To orgasm by peaches and curd;
He would scream and he’d weep
And end up in a heap
When he hadn’t begun to ungird.


Little Henry had feet quite colossal,
And the holiness of an apostle;
But when eating his fish
He would oft make a wish
That his pecker were more of a fossil.

Terese

There was a young woman in Boise
Whose sexual romps were so noise
Her mortified neighbors
Would rattle their seighbors
And threaten to send her to Joise.

Jan

Less guilt and more pleasure:

Discontents in Devon

More discontents I never had
Since I was born, than here.
Where I have been, and still am, sad,
In this dull Devonshire.
Yet justly, too, I must confess
I ne'er invented such
Ennobled numbers for the press
Than where I loathed so much.

—Robert Herrick

T.

When awful darkness and silence reign
Over the great Gromboolian plain,
Through the long, long wintry nights;
When the angry breakers roar
As they beat on the rocky shore;
When Storm-clouds brood on the towering heights
Of the Hills of the Chankly Bore,--

Then, through the vast and gloomy dark
There moves what seems a fiery spark,--
A lonely spark with silvery rays
Piercing the coal-black night,--
A meteor strange and bright:
Hither and thither the vision strays,
A single lurid light.
Slowly it wanders, pauses, creeps,--
Anon it sparkles, flashes, and leaps;
And ever as onward it gleaming goes
A light on the Bong-tree stems it throws.
And those who watch at the midnight hour
From Hall or Terrace or lofty Tower,
Cry, as the wild light passes along,--
"The Dong! the Dong!
The wandering Dong through the forest goes!
The Dong! the Dong!
The Dong with a luminous Nose!"

Long years ago
The Dong was happy and gay,
Till he fell in love with a Jumbly Girl
Who came to those shores one day.
For the Jumblies came in a sieve, they did,--
Landing at eve near the Zemmery Fidd
Where the Oblong Oysters grow,
And the rocks are smooth and grey.
And all the woods and the valleys rang
With the Chorous they daily and nightly sang,--
"Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve."

Happily, happily passed those days!
While the cheerful Jumblies staid;
They danced in circlets all night long,
To the plaintive pipe of the lively Dong,
In moonlight, shine, or shade.
For day and night he was always there
By the side of the Jumbly Girl so fair,
With her sky-blue hands and her sea-green hair;
Till the morning came of that hateful day
When the Jumblies sailed in their sieve away,
And the Dong was left on the cruel shore
Gazing, gazing for evermore,--
Ever keeping his weary eyes on
That pea-green sail on the far horizon,--
Singing the Jumbly Chorus still
As he sate all day on he grassy hill,--
"Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve."

But when the sun was low in the West,
The Dong arose and said,--
"What little sense I once possessed
Has quite gone out of my head!"
And since that day he wanders still
By lake and forest, marsh and hill,
Singing, "O somewhere, in valley or plain,
Might I find my Jumbly Girl again!
For ever I'll seek by lake and shore
Till I find my Jumbly Girl once more!"
Playing a pipe with silvery squeaks,
Since then his Jumbly Girl he seeks;
And because by night he could not see,
He gathered the bark of the Twangum Tree
On the flowery plain that grows.
And he wove him a wondrous Nose,--
A Nose as strange as a Nose could be!
Of vast proportions and painted red,
And tied with cords to the back of his head.
In a hollow rounded space it ended
With a luminous lamp within suspended,
All fenced about
With a bandage stout
To prevent the wind from blowing it out;
And with holes all round to send the light
In gleaming rays on the dismal night.

And now each night, and all night long,
Over those plains still roams the Dong;
And above the wail of the Chimp and Snipe
You may hear the squeak of his plaintive pipe,
While ever he seeks, but seeks in vain,
To meet with his Jumbly Girl again;
Lonely and wild, all night he goes,--
The Dong with a luminous Nose!
And all who watch at the midnight hour,
From Hall or Terrace or lofty Tower,
Cry, as they trace the Meteor bright,
Moving along through the dreary night,--
"This is the hour when forth he goes,
The Dong with a luminous Nose!
Yonder, over the plain he goes,--
He goes!
He goes,--
The Dong with a luminous Nose!"