I don’t think I shall finish this poem now. The fact is, I am not feeling so inspired as I was. It is very hot. Besides, I have got hay-fever and keep on sneezing. Constant sneezing knocks all the inspiration out of a man. At the same time a tendency to hay-fever is a sign of intellect and culture, and all the great poets were martyrs to it. That is why none of them grew very lyrical about hay. Corn excited them a good deal, and even straw, but hay hardly ever. So the student must finish this poem as best he can, and I shall be glad to consider and criticize what he does, though I may say at once that there will be no prize. It ought to go on for another eight verses or so, though that is not essential in these days, for if it simply won’t go on it can just stop in the middle. Only then it must be headed “MUD: A Fragment.” And in any case, in the bottom left-hand corner, the student must write: _Chintonbury, May 28th, 1920._ II In this lecture I propose to explain how comic poetry is written. Comic poetry, as I think I pointed out in my last lecture, is much more difficult than serious poetry, because there are all sorts of rules. In serious poetry there are practically no rules, and what rules there are may be shattered with impunity as soon as they become at all inconvenient. Rhyme, for instance. A well-known Irish poet once wrote a poem which ran like this:-- “Hands, do as you’re bid, Draw the balloon of the mind That bellies and sags in the wind Into its narrow shed.” This was printed in a serious paper; but if the poet had sent it up to a humorous paper (as he might well have done) the Editor would have said, “Do you pronounce it _shid_?” and the poet would have had no answer. You see, he started out, as serious poets do, with every intention of organizing a good rhyme for _bid_--or perhaps for _shed_--but he found this was more difficult than he expected. And then, no doubt, somebody drove all his cattle on to his croquet-lawn, or somebody else’s croquet-lawn, and he abandoned the struggle. I shouldn’t complain of that; what I do complain of is the _deceitfulness_ of the whole thing. If a man can’t find a better rhyme than _shed_ for a simple word like _bid_, let him give up the idea of having a rhyme at all; let him write-- Hands, do as you’re TOLD, or Into its narrow HUT (or even HANGAR). That at least would be an honest confession of failure. But to write _bid_ and _shed_ is simply a sinister attempt to gain credit for writing a rhymed poem _without doing it at all_. Well, that kind of thing is not allowed in comic poetry. When I opened my well-known military epic, “Riddles of the King,” with the couplet-- Full dress (with decorations) will be worn When General Officers are shot at dawn. the Editor wrote cuttingly in the margin, “Do you say _dorn_?”