A term applied to rough, heavy-footed, and jerky versification, and also to verses that are monotonously regular in meter.
Doggerel sometimes deliberately employed by poets for satiric,
comic, or rollicking effect.
John Skelton wrote short lines of two or three stresses, intentionally rough and variable in meter, which have come to be called Skeltonics.
He both described and exemplified his versification in Colin Clout:
For though my rhyme be ragged,
Tattered and jagged,
Rudely rain-beaten,
Rusty and moth-eaten,
If ye take well therewith,
It hath in it some pith.
The tumbling, broken, and comically grotesque octosyllabic couplet, often
using double, triple, and imperfect rhymes, developed by Samuel Butler for his satiric poem Hudibras
It is a form of deliberate doggerel that has come to be called Hudibrastic verse.
Comments