An English Patchword ( rewrite)

[dukealien]

Hi Milo
I've done a rewrite which I think presents it in a better metre.

Your second version, which effectively breaks each line in two (with other edits) to turn your couplets into quatrains is, I think, an improvement.  The rhyme scheme becomes  ABAC DEFE etc. instead of AA BB etc..  which is suitable.

Meter is another matter.  Simply, it's each line having the same - or at least similar - pattern of and number of stressed and unstressed syllables.  Take, for example, your

Tipsy maids in Gypsy Glades with

Garlands on a Mayday
Cats in hats with cricket bats
And crones playing croquet.

This scans as

/./././.
/././/
/./././
.//../

where "/" is stressed and "." is unstressed.  The last line would read, conversationally, as 

and crones playing croquet

but someone reading it aloud would try to make it fit the previous lines' accented first syllable and the second line's ending, and say

and crones playing cro-quet

but could also be confused into reading 

and crones playing croquet

with unnatural stress in "playing."  As indeed the double stress in "croquet" is in the preferred reading.

Note that leaving off the last syllable in the third line (or call it an extra on the first) has little effect.

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Working with meter takes practice; a forced rhyme can be funny, but a limping meter can be discordant.  Read your lines out loud, even scan/analyze them, as well as other poems that have definite, stable rhyme and meter.  If you stick with it, you can find the voice in  your head keeping the beat without having to read aloud as you write.

Hope that helps!