Sunday, September 28, 2008

Since I seem to be on a punning-poetry kick...

...here's James Kenneth Stephen's classic takedown of Rudyard Kipling and Rider Haggard, which has earned immortality on the strength of its final two lines (but, please, don't skip to the end without reading it all the way through, or you lose the impact):

Will there never come a season
Which shall rid us from the curse
Of a prose which knows no reason
And an unmelodious verse:
When the world shall cease to wonder
At the genius of an Ass,
And a boy's eccentric blunder
Shall not bring success to pass:
When mankind shall be delivered
From the clash of magazines,
And the inkstand shall be shivered
Into countless smithereens:
When there stands a muzzled stripling,
Mute, beside a muzzled bore:
When the Rudyards cease their Kipling
And the Haggards Ride no more.

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