Bathos, not pathos

In Competition No. 2403 you were invited to supply a poem lamenting the fate of a famous person in which bathos is the keynote.

Bathos, or unintentionally falling flat, implies a hoped-for height to fall from. A poet like McGonagall whose verse is consistently bad is pathetic rather than bathetic, whereas Wordsworth could drop hundreds of feet in seconds; witness the ‘Lucy’ poem which plunges fatally in the last two lines: ‘But she is in her grave, and Oh!/ The difference to me.’