An Overheard Conversation

[John1865]

Humour in free or irregular verse, excepting haiku, is an impossibility.
A humourous poem demands form, else it's just lame half-funny lines (so why not read a joke book instead?)
Also, word order inversion is an unnatural offence in poetry.

Thanks for the advice, thought your third point is wrong. Case in point:

I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks; (Sonnet 130)

To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were, when first your eye I ey'd, (Sonnet 104)


It seems odd to me, then, to consider word inversion an "unnatural offence" to poetry. You are most clearly wrong in this point.

I was being tongue in cheek - clearly, it didn't come across as such.
Inversion was quite the order of the day in Shakespeare's time, and it was a particular favourite of Shakespeare's.

However, it sounds anachronistic today, as do practices like:
1. rhyming 'mountain' with 'fountain' as Shelley did all the time
2. writing in the 'thou /thine' style of the King James bible (not an uncommon occurrence) to sound profound and spiritual
3. ending a line on 'fair' as a synonym for beautiful instead of light colored, just to make it rhyme with 'hair'

Naturally, no rule is eternal. If done in a skilful way, any rule can be broken.
In your case, there are two reasons why deviating from normal speech just to make line ends rhyme is not a good idea:

1. It draws attention to the rhyme and away from the meaning of the line.
2. It's clumsy and suggests that the poet is running out of ideas. An analogue from the world of comedy would be the corny joke or the insufferable pun (which Shakespeare and his contemporaries thought to be cutting edge of their craft at the time)

I hope I sounded neither rude nor short in my reply. Rather, it is the case that I find short, didactic turns of phrase to be quite insufferable. As such, I take offense to a degree unwarranted by such tongue in cheek remarks. I find no problem with your logic, for inversion is quite an old tool in poetry, and perhaps it belongs better in a by-gone era. 

But, I simply cannot abide it. Perhaps I am just and old-soul trapped in a modern world, or perhaps I am just a poor poet, but I find the inversion of sentence structure an invaluable poetic device, precisely because of its anachronistic nature. 

I cannot disagree that my inversion in this poem is particularly unskillful (I think I have improved in my latter implementation by using it more sparingly). Thank you once again for your advice, and please continue to leave more.