JIM GIBBONS WRITES: No, NOT poetry. Much of what passes for poetry is just prose arranged in lines that don’t reach the right-hand margin.

And not verse. Blank verse has rhythm, sure, but always leaves the reader unsatisfied, feeling that something is missing, like an egg without Daddies sauce.

I’m talking about the real thing. Rhyme has been loved in all ages and all countries, from nursery rhymes for children to mnemonics of codes of behaviour, hints for playing whist and a way for spies to remember secret messages.

The only disapprovers are some teachers who think it should be glossed over, swept under the carpet almost, and the supersnobs, who take the view anything popular cannot be good.

Here are some examples to show the power of rhyme:

From Noel Coward:

In Bangkok at twelve o’clock they foam at the mouth and run

But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.

From Michael Flanders and Donald Swann:

He slyly inveigled her up to his flat, to view his collection of stamps

And he said as he hastened to put out the cat, the wine, his cigar and the lamps:

“Have some madeira m’dear!”

And from the incomparable, the nonpareil Victoria Wood (Shakespeare would have given his right arm to have written this; altogether now...)

Not bleakly, not meekly! Beat me on the bottom with a Woman’s Weekly!

But he was no slouch:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see

So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

From Kipling’s scalpel-sharp The Female of the Species:

Only rarely will he squarely push the logic of the fact,

To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.

And his epitaph for a deserter:

I could not look on Death, which being known,

Men led me to him blindfold and alone.

From John Betjeman’s Christmas:

And girls in slacks remember dad

And oafish louts remember mum

And sleepless children’s hearts are glad

And Christmas morning bells say “Come!”

Some of us remember the song about the deficiencies of the Nazi leaders, which our troops sang with gusto. It ended:

Himmler’s, are very simmler;

But poor old Goebbels has noebbels at all!

A. E. Housman showed his dissatisfaction with the universe:

The laws of God, the laws of man

He may keep, who will and can.

Arthur Hugh Clough’s words have put new heart in multitudes:

Say not the struggle naught availeth, the labour and the wounds are vain

The enemy faints not, nor faileth, and as things have been they remain.

Adam Lindsay Gordon’s famous words would be memorable without rhyme, but with...

Life is mostly froth and bubble; two things stand like stone:

Kindness in another’s trouble, courage in your own.

I leave you  with a well-known couplet which many men of a certain age just cannot speak without a false start or a catch in the voice:

When you go home, tell them of us, and say:

“For your tomorrow, we gave our today.”

Whose words are those?

l Last month’s quote “When I do good...” is from Abraham Lincoln.