sherlock60 | Mrs. Hudson's Poetry Page: Charles Augustus Milverton (Reply)

Welcome once again to my poetry page!

I hope each week you will read Dr. Watson’s delightful narrative and then go on to write a poem related to it in some way. All forms of poetry are permitted, and further down the page there is a selection you might like to consider using over the coming weeks.

Rachel is happily safely back with us now. I must briefly apologise to her—I had been waiting on tenterhooks to see if she would be able to manage to get a poem to me. However, she had in fact given me her submission ahead of time, and I had asked Mr. Holmes to lock it in his drawer for safekeeping.

Whereupon I forgot all about it.

And so, courtesy of my housemaid Rachel and with an updated note, here is this week’s suggested poem to read—a suggestion inspired by the themes and subjects in this week's story. Hopefully you will enjoy the poem, and perhaps it may give you some ideas for a poem of your own or allow you to look at Dr. Watson's story in a new way.

The Maldive Shark

By Herman Melville

Note from Rachel: Home again at last! The little pilot fish in this poem remind me of the odious Milverton. Blackmailers may seem to be the small fry of the criminal classes compared to their more directly violent brethren, but Milverton leads the forces of scandal and prejudice to his chosen victims and then stands back to watch them devoured.

Thank you so much to Rachel. And here is also a new poetry form to try: the rhyming alliterisen. (The linked page is headed ‘Alliterisen’. See the bottom of the page for the ‘Rhyming Alliterisen’.)

Shadow Poetry gives this definition:

The Rhyming Alliterisen consists of 7 lines, with 7 syllables each, and has one alliteration in every line. The rhyme scheme as follows: aabbccd.

Here is my example poem (I must admit I did not quite manage alliteration in line 5):

Widows with a bob or two
Draw in Franks, Bills and Toms too.
So to sink a dud courtship
I just use my tenant’s tip.
Viz, the tip he calls a flat:
They take a look and that’s that.
My chaperone—Sherlock Holmes.

But you do not have to use this form. Any form of poetry is welcome this week—and every week! Here are a few suggestions for you:

221B verselet, abecedarian poetry, acrostic poetry, alexandrine, ballad, beeswing, blackout poetry, blitz poem, blues stanza, bref double, Burns stanza, call and response, chastushka, cinquain, circular poetry, clerihew, colour poems, compound word verse, concrete poetry, Cornish verse, curtal sonnet, diamante, doggerel, double dactyl, ekphrasis, elegiac couplet, elegiac stanza, elfje, englyn, epigram, epistle, epitaph, epulaeryu, Etheree, fable, Fib, florette, found poetry, free verse, ghazal, haiku, In Memoriam stanza, Italian sonnet, jueju, kennings poem, lanturne, limerick, line messaging, lyric poetry, mathnawī, micropoetry, mini-monoverse, musette, palindrome poetry, pantoum, Parallelismus Membrorum, poem cycle, quintilla, renga, rhyming alliterisen, riddle, rime couée, Schüttelreim, sedoka, septet, sestina, sonnet, tanka, tercet, terza rima, tongue twister poetry, triangular triplet, triolet, Tyburn, villanelle

Please leave all your poems inspired by Charles Augustus Milverton in the comments on this post. I look forward to seeing them!

Warm regards,

Mrs. Hudson