Rosalind – still disguised as Ganymede – enters and breaks up the conversation between Touchstone and Corin (at line 76). Rosalind is reading aloud one of the poems that she found hanging on a tree. The poem’s content is simplistic – a praise of Rosalind’s beauty – and its one most distinguishing feature is that all eight lines rhyme with one another.
Touchstone criticizes the poem and compares it to the idle chatter of dairy women (“butter-women”) walking to market. Touchstone also claims that he can make bad verse or poetry like this extemporaneously. Rosalind then tells him to proceed (at line 88), and Touchstone recites a silly twelve-line poem with the same simple meter and with the same simplistic rhyme scheme (lines 90- 101). After his poem is finished, Touchstone declares, “This is the very false gallop of verses” (103). Touchstone is criticizing the short and simplistic meter, which he likens to a horse galloping on and on in his metaphor. Like a horse that is going nowhere, the poetry just goes on and on a without a destination, without a real purpose. Shakespeare, through the character of Touchstone, is thus criticizing bad love poetry.
Touchstone then asks Rosalind why she even bothers reading such terrible poetry. Rosalind responds that she found the poem hanging on a tree. So, Touchstone cannot resist making a joke: “Truly, the tree yields bad fruit” (105). In response, Rosalind