In 2002, I wrote a 404 parody of Poe’s The Raven. Overall I liked it (particularly the rhyming of three 4-syllable words), but it never felt completely right, particularly the 2nd and 5th lines. Today, I found my original post, went back to the drawing board – so to speak – and ended up with this.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I searched on Google, weary,
scanning through pages of random results from São Paulo to Al Gore.
Suddenly, the information! Relevant, through invocation
of the proper combination of search strings, not less nor more.
"This is the result," I exclaimed, clicking the link to explore...</p>

Quoth the server, 404.</em></center>

Let us examine the original. Most people remember The Raven as 8-8-8-7 verse with a "da-da" rhythm. But look at what the first two lines actually are, with what I believe are the intended stresses:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,

It's actually 8-8-17. Now, you could ignore "over", at which point it would be 8-8-8-7, but would put a lot of stress on the middle syllable of "curious", which doesn't sound right. What I believe Poe did was to break up the mental rhythm the reader had gotten himself into over the first line, and restore it by the end of the second line, and the entire line was meant to be read more or less free-form. The lack of a "-ry" rhyme at the word "curious" 8 syllables in seems to support that.

Now here's my original version, with stresses on how it ended up being read:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I searched on Google, weary,
sorting through a list of results; Middleeast histry and Al Gore.

The problem was I continued the "da-da" rhythm and ended the second sentence's first fragment after 8 syllables. There may be 17 syllables total in my second line, but because the rhythm wasn't broken up, the reader continued with the rhythm and ran into a big problem with the second fragment. He would then try to compensate by cramming "Middle East" and "history" each into one syllable to preserve the 8-8-8-7 rhythm.

This is the replacement:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I searched on Google, weary,
scanning through pages of random results from São Paulo to Al Gore.

This works better. There are still 17 syllables, but I used some of Poe's same tricks to break up the rhythm into a free-form line. The stress positions aren't exactly the same as The Raven, but it didn't have to be, as long as the rhythm was broken up by the 8th syllable, and the sentence ended on a stress.

Other changes to my parody were comparatively minor. The third line had a lead-in "and" while the original did not, so I changed "And there it was" to "Suddenly". The fifth line actually had an error, 16 syllables instead of 15 in the original. So it was rewritten to fix this, and it now contains 15 syllables, but also matches the rhythm of the original closer. The number of syllables in each fragment of the sentence match exactly, though the stresses aren't the same between the two because I couldn't find a satisfactory way to end on a one-syllable "-ore". But again, it breaks up the rhythm and restores it again by ending on a stress, so it works.

(Note: I am not a literary expert, but I play one on TV! Edgar Allan Poe could not be reached for comment.)