What Is Doggerel?
Quick answer: Doggerel is clumsy, badly made verse: forced rhymes, thumping metre, trite thought. Learn where the word comes from and how to keep it out of your poems.
Doggerel is verse that is clumsy, trivial or badly made: rhymes that feel forced, a metre that thumps or stumbles, and sentiments that clunk. The word is almost always an insult, describing poetry where the mechanics show and the rhyme visibly drives the meaning instead of serving it. That said, there is a second, friendlier sense: comic verse written badly on purpose, where the clumsiness is the joke. Greeting-card rhymes, football chants and birthday-speech poems all live in doggerel country, sometimes happily.
Every rhyming poet has written doggerel, usually without noticing, which is why the term is worth understanding rather than just fearing. The line between charming light verse and doggerel is thinner than beginners think, and the line between sincere poetry and accidental doggerel is thinner still. This page covers where the word comes from, what exactly tips verse over the edge, the man who became its patron saint, and how to rescue a draft that has started to jingle.
The poem
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.
William McGonagall, 'The Tay Bridge Disaster' (1880)
Where the Word Comes From
The insult is old. It derives from 'dog', used contemptuously, the way we still say a dog's dinner: verse fit for dogs. Its most famous early appearance is in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in the late 1300s, where Chaucer plays a good joke on himself. The pilgrim Chaucer tells the Tale of Sir Thopas, a deliberately awful jog-trot romance, until the Host interrupts in disgust and dismisses it as 'rym dogerel'. The father of English poetry, in other words, introduced the term by writing intentional doggerel and getting heckled for it inside his own poem.
That origin sets the tone for the word's whole career: it has always covered both accidental badness and strategic badness, and the difference is control. Chaucer could stop being terrible whenever he wished. The true doggerelist cannot.
The Diagnostic Symptoms
What actually makes verse doggerel? Not rhyme itself, and not simplicity. Blake's songs are simple and rhymed and are among the glories of English. Doggerel is what happens when the machinery takes command of the meaning. The reliable symptoms are worth memorising, because they are exactly what an editor or contest judge spots in the first ten seconds.
William McGonagall, Patron Saint
Every discussion of doggerel arrives at William Topaz McGonagall, the Dundee weaver widely celebrated as the worst poet in the English language. His signature piece, 'The Tay Bridge Disaster' (1880), commemorates a real tragedy in lines whose rhymes land like dropped trays and whose metre changes length whenever the facts require it. He informs us solemnly that the bridge's collapse will be remembered for a very long time, rhyming Tay, say, away and day with total confidence.
The instructive thing about McGonagall is that he was sincere. He believed himself a great poet, toured his readings, and endured flying vegetables with dignity. His work fails not from lack of feeling but from a complete deafness to how his lines sounded, and that is doggerel's real lesson: sincerity does not protect a poem. Craft does. A century on, his books remain in print precisely because the badness is so pure, a kind of accidental immortality no competent minor poet of his era achieved.
Deliberate Doggerel: When Bad Is Good
Written on purpose, doggerel becomes a tool. Samuel Butler's 'Hudibras' (1663) mocked Puritan solemnity in bouncing tetrameter couplets with absurd rhymes, a style so distinctive it earned its own name, hudibrastic verse. Jonathan Swift used rough, deliberately graceless rhymes for satire. In the twentieth century, Ogden Nash built an entire beloved career on lines of wildly uneven length that chase a rhyme across as many syllables as necessary, mis-spelling words to force them into agreement; the incompetence is precision-engineered and the effect is delight.
The test of deliberate doggerel is the same as Chaucer's: control. Nash can be graceful whenever he likes, so his clumsiness reads as wit. Nursery rhymes, playground chants and protest slogans also borrow doggerel's thump because a heavy beat is memorable and democratic. Doggerel, in short, is only a disease when the poet has caught it unknowingly.
How to Keep Doggerel Out of Your Poems
The root cause of accidental doggerel is almost always the same: the rhyme was chosen before the meaning. The poet needs a word to rhyme with heart, and suddenly people are apart, or worlds fall apart, or something is torn apart, whether or not the poem wanted to say so. The cure is to demote rhyme from driver to passenger. Draft the thought first in honest prose order; then, if you want rhyme, revise toward sounds without letting them commandeer the sentence.
Reading aloud is the other essential test. Doggerel is a sound defect, so the ear catches it long before the eye does: listen for the jingle, the padded syllables, the sentence bent backwards. Slant rhyme (home and rain, moon and mind) is the modern poet's escape hatch, giving music without the thump. Contest judges see rhyme-driven inversions constantly; on a scorecard like Writory's, which marks language and structure separately, forced rhyme quietly taxes both at once, while a natural half-rhyme costs nothing and often earns credit for craft.
A Worked Rescue
Here is a doggerel quatrain of the kind every judge has met: 'I walked along the beach one day, / and watched the waves come out to play, / my heart was full of happy cheer, / because the summertime was here.' Every symptom is present: rhyme-driven filler, prefabricated sentiment, the thumping beat.
A rescue keeps the scene and evicts the machinery: 'Low tide. The beach wears everything it found: / kelp, one sandal, a jellyfish like spilled glass. / I have nowhere to be until the light goes.' No rhyme, but rhythm; no happy cheer, but an earned ease. If you want to keep rhyme, keep it and loosen it, letting the sentences run past the line ends so the rhymes surface quietly instead of arriving on the beat like a doorbell. Either way, the poem starts saying what happened rather than what the rhyme scheme demanded.
What poets can take from this
- Draft the meaning in natural prose order first; add rhyme in revision instead of writing toward it.
- Read every rhyming draft aloud and listen for the jingle, the padding and the backwards sentence.
- If a line only exists to deliver a rhyme, cut the line and keep the thought.
- Use slant rhyme and enjambment to get music without the doorbell thump of full end rhyme.
- Match rhythm to subject; a bouncing metre on a grave subject reads as doggerel even when the rhymes behave.
- Study one deliberately bad poet (McGonagall) and one controlled comic (Nash) to learn the difference by ear.
Try it yourself
Write two versions of the same four-line poem about an ordinary chore: first as gleeful, deliberate doggerel with the worst rhymes you can force, then as a rhymeless version that keeps only what was true. Notice what survived.
Questions
Is all rhyming poetry doggerel?
Not at all. Doggerel is not defined by rhyme but by rhyme taking control: forced sounds, bent syntax, padded metre and prefabricated feeling. Shakespeare, Blake, Dickinson and Frost all rhymed without a line of doggerel, because in their poems the meaning drives and the rhyme rides along.
Can doggerel be good?
Yes, when it is deliberate. Comic verse, satire, nursery rhymes and Ogden Nash's whole career use intentional clumsiness for effect, and Chaucer wrote parody doggerel in the 1300s. The difference is control: a poet choosing to sound bad for a laugh is doing something quite different from a poet who cannot hear the problem.
Why does my rhyming poem sound like a greeting card?
Almost certainly because the rhymes were chosen before the thoughts, which pulls the poem toward stock phrases that happen to chime. Try drafting without rhyme first, then revising toward slant rhymes and running sentences across line breaks. If a rhyme forces you to say something you would never say in speech, it has to go.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.