The Ode Less Traveled by Stephen Fry

Holy cow, today I finally started reading The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry and I am totally in love with this book! It's very positive and witty (and RIFE with puns) and makes you feel like ANYONE can have fun writing poetry, with a bit of studying. I've only read the introduction and chapter one, but I've already learned about meter and feet and iambs and trochees and spondees and THE IAMBIC PENTAMETER!

Each chapter ends with a series of poetry exercises, so I thought I would post some of mine here, in case anyone else wants to try their hand and post some response-poetry in the comments. Get ready for some bad poetry!!! :D

The first poetry exercise was to mark-up the meter and feet in a bunch of lines of iambic pentameter. The second exercise was to write 20 lines of your OWN iambic pentameter in 10 minutes! Most of mine were crap, but here are a few I thought were so-so:

My beard has grown in length and girth and gray
I wish I had more hours in the day!

That Shakespeare bloke could do this in his sleep

I've also started reading a giant collection of WB Yeats Poems which was given to me over ten years ago, but which I only just cracked the spine on last week. A lot of it is going over my head, but there sure are some sweet lines in there too. I'm sure I'll get more and more out of it as I plow through the Fry.

Please post some iambic pentameter in the comments!