Doggerel

Doggerel – pronounced with the stress on the first syllable and a hard ‘g’, IPA: /'dɒ gə rəl/ – is badly written poetry or verse. (Note that doggerel is not a count noun and does not have a plural: two pieces of badly written verse are NOT two doggerels, but two instances or examples of doggerel.)

The features of a piece of verse that might justify its description as doggerel include: irregularities in the metre and imperfections in the rhymes, as well as defects of style (e.g., inappropriately poetic language) and content (e.g., the triteness of the theme).

A distinction may be drawn between two types of doggerel.

Some doggerel is simply the result of the limited poetic gifts of its author, who has attempted to write ‘good’ poetry and conspicuously failed. As an example of doggerel of this type here are the first two stanzas of The Tay Bridge Disaster by the Scottish poetaster William McGonagall (1825-1902), said by some to be the worst poet in the history of the English language:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

‘Twas about seven o’clock at night,

And the wind it blew with all its might,

And the rain came pouring down,

And the dark clouds seem’d to frown,

And the demon of the air seem’d to say

’I’ll blow down the Bridge of Tay.’

The description of these lines as doggerel involves an adverse judgment on them from a literary point of view.

Quite different are those examples of doggerel in which the author has deliberately written ‘badly’ for some further purpose, usually for comic effect. Here as an example is Samson Agonistes, one of the many doggerel poems of the American poet, (Frederic) Ogden Nash (1902-1971):

I test my bath before I sit

And I’m always moved to wonderment

That what chills the finger not a bit

Is so frigid upon the fundament.

The description of this poem as doggerel identifies its form but does not involve an adverse judgment on it from a literary point of view.

Arguably, clerihews should be regarded as doggerel since they are characterised by metrical irregularity and often have rather forced rhymes.

Etymological note: The word doggerel comes from the middle English ‘dogerel’, meaning ‘worthless’, which in turn is thought to come from ‘dog’.