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KINDS OF POETRY. 15 |
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object is to improve manners and promote virtue by depicting vice in its true colours, and by holding up to ridicule hypocrisy and cant. Dryden, Pope, Butler, Dean Swift, Burns, Byron, Tom Hood, and Robert Buchanan are our most famous satirists in verse.
6.—THE SONNET. (See page 203.^
7.—THE EPIGRAM.
This is a short poem on some single thought, brevity and wit being its essentials, the point generally coming at the end, e.g. :
On an M.P. who wrote a severe critique on " The Pleasures
of Memory.'
They say he has no heart, but I deny it; He has a heart—and gets his speeches by it
On a Curate's Eyes. My daughters praise our curate's eyes—
I know not if their light's divine, For when he prays he closes his,
And when he preaches I shut mine.
The Epitaph is a species of epigram, designed to eulogise or satirise some defunct individual, and as the name implies is supposed to be inscribed on his tomb, e.g. :
Here lie the bones of Robert Lowe, Where he's gone to I don't know ; If to the realms of peace and love, Farewell to happiness above ; If haply to some lower level, We can't congratulate the devil |
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