Light verse, for some reason, demands to be written in a rather old-fashioned way. The language can, and should, be as modern as you like, but it should still not merely scan and rhyme, but should do so with felicitous ingenuity. It should pour itself, without any contortions, into apparently complex molds. There is an enormous satisfaction in reading what could be, say, an extract from a legal document, full of whereases and notwithstandings, which the poet has contrived to arrange into triple-rhyming decasyllabic quatrains, with the odd internal rhyme for the hell of it.

This was the sort of thing that Wodehouse liked, together with the typical frills of English light verse, such as the sudden letdown from mock-romance to slang. He liked the idea of an established form being made to learn new tricks. He liked the unbuttoned, conversational style, moving within strict measures. (His novels, mutatis mutandis, could be described in very similar terms.) He liked the established but not yet ossified tradition—this one goes back beyond Byron, and includes Barham of The Ingoldsby Legends, C. S. Calverley, and of course the Gilbert of both the Savoy Operas and The Bab Ballads. Some of Wodehouse's own early verse [in Punch] is very Gilbertian, both in theme and style; and one of his very last pieces in Punch is in triple-rhyming dactylic heptameters with internal rhymes, the exact (and immensely difficult) meter of several Gilbert patter songs.

Wodehouse's first contribution to the paper was in prose, and therefore outside my brief—but I won't let that stop me, as it was an article that, as assistant editor of Punch, I was still rejecting, in one form or another, at least twice a year some sixty years later; it was the one about the man who is building up a unique collection of rejection slips which will be ruined by the acceptance of this very article. Wodehouse's was a variant on the main theme, but a not particularly variant variant. That first Wodehouse contribution was in September 1902, and by the end of the year he had three pieces of verse accepted…. (pp. 46-7)

What are they like? Could one honestly say that one detected a marked difference from other verses appearing around that time? I think not. [The then editor, Owen Seaman,]… liked verse smooth and correct; he didn't care for strong feelings or blunt attacks; he preferred superficial little poems about courtship and love (one of Wodehouse's is a "Gourmet's Love Song," about a man regretting all the things he can't eat because he has lost his appetite over a girl). Seaman also liked verses with a topical peg, a quote from a newspaper, or a current event. Wodehouse welcomed the return of Buffalo Bill Cody to London with a set of triple-rhymed verses, rhyming "tomahawk" with "from a hawk," and "fortuitous" with "displease, when we view it, us."… The year 1903 was much fatter, with forty-seven contributions—almost one a week—eighteen of them verse….

The chief thing that strikes one is the variety. One does not normally think of Wodehouse as a particularly versatile writer, rather as a man who early found two or three things he could do well, and then proceeded to perfect those performances until they were immaculate. But these early verses disclose other potential Wodehouses. There are, for instance, a couple of parodies of Kipling, a writer for whose verse one would have thought he had very little sympathy. There is an attack—quite sharp—on the self-promoting novelist Hall Caine…. (p. 47)

There is an antimilitaristic poem about a proposal to train boys at an early age in the arts of war. This must refer to the beginnings of Baden-Powell's Boy Scout movement, apparently not even christened as yet. If so it is the first appearance of Wodehouse's lifelong irreverence about Boy Scouts, which recurs in the decks, from The Swoop! (1909) to the last appearance of "young blighted Edwin," Boy Scout son of Lord Worplesdon, in Joy in the Morning (1947). But in that early poem the open note of scorn and even (within the limitations of the genre) of sorrow rings strangely now.

There are poems which are almost music-hall songs; one can imagine the ode celebrating the return of Sherlock Holmes being brayed out by a chorus line. And then, enchantingly, there are pieces, or casual phrases, which foreshadow the mature Wodehouse. The saga of the young man who one night, as if by accident, tied the absolutely perfect bow tie and ruined his life trying to do it again might easily have occurred in the Drones…. (pp. 47-8)

In the following few years the spate lessens to around one contribution a month…. The style remains much the same, and so do the subjects, but they haven't the gusto of the earlier pieces. Between the wars there is almost nothing from Wodehouse in Punch (in 1919 a neat poem about two civil servants who know each other only by memos; a mock-rustic ballad about warble-flies in 1930). Then Malcolm Muggeridge persuaded him back into the paper when he took over as editor in 1953…. Mostly [Wodehouse's] contributions were "Our Man in America" pieces—cockeyed reporting on the loopier aspects of the American scene—but once or twice a year he would send us a bit of verse. I find these late poems oddly moving, considering that was the last thing Wodehouse intended them to be. They are so obviously written for fun. They are leisurely and relaxed, very confident, largely nonsense and difficult to quote; [among them, the] "Song about Whiskers," whose argument, if you can call it an argument, was that America hadn't been the same since beards went out…. What I get from these last few poems is a sense of immense geniality, of pleasure in writing something he didn't have to write, and what's more in writing it for Punch, because that was the proper place for such things to appear in…. (p. 48)