Doggerel
Quick answer: Doggerel is crude, clumsy verse with forced rhymes and irregular meter, sometimes used deliberately for comic effect. Learn what doggerel means in poetry.
Doggerel is verse that is crude, clumsy, or trivial in construction, marked by forced rhymes, lurching meter, and banal sentiment. The word is usually an insult, poetry's equivalent of calling a building a shack, and it has been one since the fourteenth century; the term appears in Chaucer, whose Host interrupts the deliberately awful Tale of Sir Thopas to complain about its 'rym dogerel'.
But the full story is more interesting than the insult. Doggerel has a second life as a deliberate technique: poets from Chaucer onward have written intentionally bad verse for parody, satire, and comedy, and folk doggerel, the rough rhymes of broadsides, epitaphs, and local newspapers, carries real cultural warmth. Knowing exactly what makes verse doggerel is also the fastest way to keep your own work from becoming it accidentally.
How It Works, or Fails To
The classic symptoms: rhyme forcing sense (word order mangled or ideas invented purely to reach a rhyme), meter that stumbles without purpose, padding syllables ('so very', 'it is true') stuffed in to fill the line, dead abstractions, and sentiment asserted rather than earned. Each fault comes from the same root: the form driving the content instead of serving it.
A demonstration written to be bad, on purpose: 'The sunset it was very nice and red up in the sky, it made me think of days gone past and also by and by.' Inverted syntax for rhyme, filler everywhere, emotion claimed and never shown: textbook doggerel.
Where You Will See It
Chaucer's Sir Thopas is the founding example of strategic doggerel, so tedious the fictional audience revolts. The Scottish poet William McGonagall (1825-1902) became immortal for unintentional doggerel; his poem on the Tay Bridge disaster is so majestically inept that it is still performed for joy. Samuel Butler's Hudibras (1663-1678) weaponised rough four-beat couplets, now called hudibrastics, for satire. Greeting cards, advertising jingles, and local commemorative verse keep the artless strain alive, while comic poets keep the artful strain in business.
How to Use It, and How to Avoid It
As a tool, doggerel is excellent for parody and character: give a pompous speaker deliberately clunky couplets and the verse itself becomes the satire. The craft lies in controlled failure, wrong in exactly the ways that are funny, which paradoxically demands a very good ear.
To avoid it unintentionally, hunt its symptoms in revision. Read your rhymed drafts aloud and flag every place where word order twists to reach a rhyme, every filler phrase, every emotion stated rather than embodied. If the rhyme word chose the thought, replace one or the other. Contest judges see a great deal of accidental doggerel; strict self-editing on these points moves a poem out of that pile immediately.
What poets can take from this
- Never let a rhyme dictate your word order or your ideas.
- Cut filler phrases that exist only to plump the meter.
- Show feeling through images instead of announcing it.
- Study McGonagall to learn every fault in one place.
- If writing doggerel deliberately, choose your errors precisely.
Try it yourself
Write two versions of the same four-line poem about a local event: first as gleeful deliberate doggerel with the worst rhymes you can force, then as a clean quatrain. Note every specific repair you made between the versions.
Questions
Is doggerel always bad poetry?
Unintentional doggerel is failed verse, yes. But deliberate doggerel is a respected comic and satiric technique, from Chaucer's Sir Thopas to Butler's Hudibras, where controlled clumsiness is the point.
What is the difference between doggerel and light verse?
Light verse is polished writing that aims to amuse; its craft is exact. Doggerel is defined by faulty craft, forced rhymes and broken rhythm, whether accidental or staged. Light verse laughs with you; doggerel is usually laughed at.
Why is William McGonagall famous if his poetry is bad?
Because his badness is total, confident, and consistent, which makes it genuinely entertaining. His Tay Bridge disaster poem is preserved and performed as beloved comic heritage, an honour better poets never achieved.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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