I am his Highness’ dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
Evening traffic homeward burns
Swift and even on the turns.
His house is in the village though;
Umberto Eco argued that lists are the origin of culture — that we make them because we don’t want to die. By naming and categorizing the chaos of the world, we create order against the infinite. Lists preserve knowledge, pass down traditions, and tame the wilderness into something we can understand.
The same is true of poetry. Formal verse is another human tool for imposing order on chaos. Before writing existed, meter and rhyme were old-fashioned data compression — mnemonic devices that made laws, genealogies, and stories memorable enough to survive. The synchronized beat of a shared rhythm let groups recite and pass on culture together.
Shakespeare made this claim explicitly. In Sonnet 55, he argues that while bodies and stone monuments decay, the structure of verse defeats death itself:
“Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.”
There’s something physiological going on too. A steady meter mimics the heartbeat and slows the breath. Rhyme creates a sonic promise — and when the closing word lands, the brain gets a small hit of satisfaction from an expectation fulfilled. Formal constraints act like a banister on a steep staircase: you can peer into dark emotional depths without falling in, because the structure holds you safe.
Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smile awake you when you rise.
Muriel Rukeyser understood this with fierce clarity. In The Life of Poetry (1949), she argued that poetry is not decoration or entertainment but a vital resource — something to reach for, as you might reach into a medicine chest, when rational prose just isn’t enough.
“In times of crisis, we turn to poetry. We need it then… it is an exchange of energy.”
Rukeyser was an uncompromising political radical who had no patience for agitprop or posturing. A slogan demands conformity; a poem reaches an individual consciousness. Poetry saves us, she argued, because it is the only medium that refuses to lie about human emotion. If poetry lies, it is dead.
I’ve just read her extraordinary poem The Book of the Dead — a searing account of an industrial disaster — and it proves the point. It’s a political poem, a documentary, an indictment. It carries all the force of formal verse without regular meter, driven instead by what T.S. Eliot called the music of poetry: the underlying rhythm, cadence, and sound that distinguishes free verse from prose. Good poetry always has music with or without the formal constraints of rhyme and metrical form.
But free verse and its music are for another day. Back to couplets.
The particular meter I keep returning to is tetrameter — four iambic beats per line, one beat shorter than Shakespeare’s preferred pentameter. That missing beat pulls it away from high rhetoric and toward something older and more intimate: the nursery rhyme, the ballad, the lullaby. It has a hypnotic, rocking quality that feels both ancient and immediately familiar.
I started a collection – a list – of lines in tetrameter. But as usual, when it comes to words and language, some things just won’t stay in their place, and lo and behold, the lines started talking to each other across time and geography and genre.
This is where the couplets come in. Think of it as a game that anyone can play:
The game is simple. Take any two lines of tetrameter from anywhere across five centuries of poetry, nursery rhymes, ballads, jingles, and nonsense verse. Light blue touch paper and let the sparks fly. Stand back.
Our God, our help in ages past — I’ve got the foreman’s job at last.
I am the master of my fate — Because I have a luncheon date.
I wandered lonely as a cloud — Inspired by British cheers and loud.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may — Lest children cut themselves at play.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall —That is not what I meant, at all.
And, as in uffish thought he stood — Isn’t it good, Norwegian wood
Come live with me and be my love — Up there, two thousand feet above.
Robin Hood and Little John — Went to bed with their trousers on.
With cats, some say, one rule is true — You do not do, you do not do.
The grave’s a fine and private place — Be glad your nose is on your face.
Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd — He says he thinks there is no God.
Busy old fool, unruly sun — Stole a pig, and away he run.
I heard a fly buzz when I died — The mirror cracked from side to side.
Mademoiselle from Armentieres — Set folks together by the ears.
Full fathom five thy father lies — Matilda told such dreadful lies.
Some say the world will end in fire — Bring me my arrows of desire.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep — Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad — It’s not their fault that they are mad.
Stone walls do not a prison make — The sedge has withered from the lake.
Golden lads and girls all must — Be blown about the desert dust.
In Flanders fields the poppies grow — Ring, happy bells, across the snow.
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun — Who stoops to perpetrate a pun.
O western wind when wilt thou blow — Talking of Michelangelo.
All the hills and vales along — Some love too little, some too long.
Pain has an element of Blank — And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank.
And on the low dark verge of life — With your one wild and precious life.
Da-dum Da-dum Da-dum Da-dum (and variations)
Got a line that comes to mind? (One is good but the more the merrier) Poems? Mother Goose? Slogans? Advertising jingles? (For Brits of a certain vintage: “A million housewives every day…”
Put them in the comments and let’s get them talking, and posted in the next installment
Brilliant, Josie. I like these. Some made me really chuckle.