The Lament of Doggerel’s Recalcitrant Poet and Metric’s Experimental Haibun.

Free Verse! That innovation of the twentieth century: It was, designed, or supposedly intended, we are told to free poets from the restraints of restrictive meter in order to voice a freer element of poetic expression. Did it? It would now appear that poets are at present more restricted than they ever were.

Oh! How a time's poet seeks he to recall
those freedoms, that seem lost, to all.
No more, he voices new opinions free,
from shackles, of their callow parsimony.

It would appear that the principles of Ockham’s razor were by all accounts, conveniently forgotten in the convening of new rules; in that one set of chains were surreptitiously exchanged for others in their multiples of entanglement. Wherein, little sense was apparently employed in their unskilled forgings.

Who bind morality, to their self-made code?:
those zealots, of new poetry’s road?
That preach, their sadder social inveracities:
in never-ending gospels of restraint.

New precepts regarding poetry function were then proposed in typical contradictory fashion. Where like the Bible, they are presumed, to have an answer to everything, and realistically present a solution to nothing.

In order that their comfort's plaint should so,
intrude amongst they who ain’t.
Ever likely becomes what some would call
“their forums: bloody poetry Saint."

Old values now scorned, whilst new plastic effigies put in their place hinder creative poetry like the drag chains on a slipway launching.

Whose statue towers high above us all.
‘Til aged time takes its deserving fall.
And we will once again, rejoice and call.
“illi qui oro ad falsos deos, predicate vacua atria”.

Mor.