Today’s Poem: Rose-Cheeked Laura

Thomas Campion on what to do when rhyming is too easy

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Portrait of a girl, English, early 17th century (Wikimedia Commons)

In a 1602 treatise, Observations in the Art of English Poesie, the composer-physician Thomas Campion (1567–1620) inveighs against “the vulgar and artificial custom of riming.” What he really objects to, as it turns out, is not rhyme so much as sloppiness. English poets have inherited th…