Here you will find stumbling meter, poor rimes, sentences and words mangled to make a rime, inappropriate and inconsistent word choice, silly metaphors, and sentimentality (writers expecting us to share their apparently-great emotion though they give us no reason to do so).

(1) From Enoch Arden by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

So passed the strong heroic soul away.
And when they buried him, the little port
Had seldom seen a costlier funeral.

(2) From Purely Original Verse (1891) by J. Gordon Coogler (1865-1901) of Columbia, South Carolina:

Alas for the South, her books have grown fewer—
She never was much given to literature.

(3) From “Lines Written to a Friend on the Death of His Brother, Caused by a Railway Train Running Over Him Whilst He Was in a State of Inebriation” by James Henry Powell:

Thy mangled corpse upon the rails in frightful shape was found.
The ponderous train had killed thee as its heavy wheels went round,
And thus in dreadful form thou met'st a drunkard's awful death
And I, thy brother, mourn thy fate, and breath a purer breath.

(4) From Dolce Far Niente by the American poet Francis Saltus Saltus, star of the 1890’s:

Her laugh is like sunshine, full of glee,
And her sweet breath smells like fresh-made tea.

(5) Francis Saltus Saltus again, “The Spider”:

Then all thy feculent majesty recalls
The nauseous mustiness of forsaken bowers
The leprous nudity of forsaken halls--
The positive nastiness of of sullied flowers.

And I mark the colors yellow and black
That fresco thy lithe, dictatorial thighs,
I dream and wonder on my drunken back
How God could possibly have created flies!

(6) From “Song to the Suliotes” by George Gordon, Lord Byron:

Up to battle! Sons of Suli
Up, and do your duty duly!
There the wall—and there the moat is:
Bouwah! Bouwah! Suliotes,
There is booty—there is beauty!
Up my boys and do your duty!

(7) From a juvenile poem of John Dryden, “Upon the Death of the Lord Hastings” (a victim of smallpox):

Each little pimple had a tear in it
To wail the fault its rising did commit . . .

(8) From “I Kissed Pa Twice After His Death” by Mattie J. Peterson (1866-1947), the self-styled “Poetissima Laureatissima of Bladen County”:

I saw him coming stepping high,
Which was of his walk the way . . .

(9) From “The Abbey Mason” by Thomas Hardy:

When longer yet dank death hadc wormed
The brain wherein the style had germed

From Gloucester church it flew afar—
The style called perpendicular—

To Winton and to Westminster
It ranged and grew still beautifuller . . .

(10) A metaphor from “The Crucible of Life” by the once-popular American newspaper poet Edgar A. Guest:

Sacred and sweet is the joy that must come
From the furnace of life when you pour off the scum.

(11) From an elegy for Queen Victoria by one of her subjects:

Dust to dust, and ashes to ashes,
Into the tomb the Great Queen dashes.

(12) “Life” by Grace Treasone:

Life is like a jagged tooth
that cuts into your heart;
fix the tooth and save the root,
and laughs, not tears, will start.

(13) From “Thoughts on Capital Punishment” by Rod McKuen:

There ought to be something, something that’s fair
to avenge Mrs. Badger as she waits in her lair
for her husband who lies with his guts spilling out
cause he didn’t know what automobiles are about.

(14) A few deliberately bad lines from Ogden Nash’s “Very Like a Whale”:

How about the man who wrote,
Her little feet stole in and out like mice beneath her petticoat?
Wouldn’t anyone but a poet think twice
Before stating that his girl’s feet were mice?
Then they always say things like that after a winter storm
The snow is a white blanket. Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a
six-inch blanket of snow and I’ll sleep under a half-inch blanket of
unpoetical blanket material and we’ll see which one keeps warm,