Monday, January 15, 2007

The duck's lead time is 2 weeks

And so he felt compelled to write a poem letting the poor cowering Iraqis who feared his return know that it was safe to stop cowering.

I'm not sure that anyone reallly feared Saddam's return at this point. On the other hand, the poorly handled execution did effectively turn the unpopular secular dictator into a Sunni Muslim martyr. Oops. Fortunately, it doesn't appeared to have sparked an immediate wave of sectarian violence, but his death also didn't put an end to the civil war either.

From the rhyme scheme of Mr Tinsley's attempt at poetry, this is apparently supposed to be a limerick. Of course, I may be wrong, because while it does have the AABBA rhyme scheme of a limerick, it has nothing remotely resembling the metric quality of a limerick. Or the metric quality of, well, anything. This is my English major side coming out. I've done far too much scansion of poetry to take a poorly-written poem like this seriously. Heck, forget trying to get three metric feet out of the A lines and two from the B lines, we're looking at something where we can't even get consistent syllable counts. And while a limerick is a sort of "low" poetry, it does have a very rigid meter to it. Try saying, "There once was a man from Nantucket, etc." but replacing each syllable with a "dah", stressing where appropriate. You can easily feel how the limerick is supposed to go. Now try and read Tinsley's poem the same way. Notice how it really really doesn't work?

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