This the age of so called blank verse and the era of the modern poet
To new age high brows at poetry readings new age writers stanzas from their own poems quote.
The rhyme poets are gone and buried and rhyme too is with the dead
And though not entirely forgotten their verses now are seldom read
Life goes on and times are changing and sports the main culture of today
And many writers remain unpublished and literature is in decay.
Centuries have passed since the time of Chaucer the first great known man of rhyme
And after him came Robert Herrick quite a legend in his time
Pope and Goldsmith, Crabbe and Wordsworth, Burns, Byron, Keats, Shelley and Clare,
Tennyson and Bwowning, Allingham and Mangan these were names beyond compare
These were more than simple rhymers though in rhyme they did celebrate
The beauty to be seen in Nature through them we did appreciate
How lucky we are to have plenty whilst others poverty endure
There’s only one thing worse than being poor and that is to be very poor.
Scott and Coleridge and Robert Southey long before Kipling and Yeats
To them writing rhyme was second Nature these men were poetic greats
And Elizabeth Barrett and Felicia Hemans flew the flag for woman kind
And Christina Rossetti sister of Dante Gabriel her equal would be hard to find.
The Americans Longfellow, Lowell and Whittier as well as Edgar Allan Poe
Giants of the literary world a few centuries ago
And John Shaw Neilson and Henry Kendall from Australia poor though famous at a time
When much of their Homeland was still unexplored long before the death of rhyme.
John Masefield and William Henry Davies, James Stephens and Walter De La Mare
These were poets of the people read and respected everywhere
Till the passing decades rung the changes and we live in a time of change
And those who write rhyme now are dismissed as old fashioned and quite strange.
And then there were the famous war poets Kilmer, Brooke, Thomas And Wilfred Owen
And John McCrae of ‘In Flanders Field’ fame the greatest war poem ever known
And Francis Ledwidge ‘The poet of the blackbird’ poets and soldiers who died young
They were feted as war heroes and their songs were loved and sung.
Robert Service and John Betjeman through their verses were known Worldwide
But from the early sixties onwards rhyme it went into a slide
And the passing decades rung the changes suppose that every thing has it’s time
And poetry lost to the masses it died with the death of rhyme.
Still one day in the distant future the spirit of rhyme will awake
And people will revisit the old masters the poems of Shakespeare, Cowper, Gray and Blake
And rhyme will be reclaimed by the masses where it rightfully belong,
Rhyme the mother of the siblings lyrical ballad and song.

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