Bathos, not pathos

In Competition No. 2403 you were invited to supply a poem lamenting the fate of a famous person in which bathos is the keynote.

Bathos, or unintentionally falling flat, implies a hoped-for height to fall from. A poet like McGonagall whose verse is consistently bad is pathetic rather than bathetic, whereas Wordsworth could drop hundreds of feet in seconds; witness the ‘Lucy’ poem which plunges fatally in the last two lines: ‘But she is in her grave, and Oh!/ The difference to me.’ In awarding the prizes I haven’t strictly applied the above distinction; in fact Gerard Benson’s entry never fell because it never tried to rise, but since it made me laugh on a glum day he is among the winners printed below. They get £25 each, and Mary Holtby receives £30 for her exercise in what Pope called ‘the art of sinking’.