Annieglen, I don't think that someone else having set a poem to music makes it taboo for anyone else to do it. Unless the composer is also the poet, of course. Or unless that music has become totally identified with the poem. That still doesn't stop some people, if they have heard something in their heads that needs to be sung. For example, Christina Rossetti's carol "In the bleak midwinter" has a tune by Holst, but has recently had a new tune set to it, equally good.

Margarita, I haven't posted here before, because I only do a little in the verse line. But when I do, it is because something has to be written that way, rather than prose. The form it comes in depends on all the rest of the verse I know, so reading or listening a lot is important. I'm very picky about the way it develops: if I have to force subsequent verses into the rhyme scheme, I usually dump it. The whole thing, not the scheme. I have a personal dislike of songs which start off with a complex rhyme scheme, involving internal rhymes, dump the latter in the second verse, switch to assonance in the third, and have no rhymes at all in the last. My ears expect rhymes to certain tunes. Much as I admire Gilbert's skill with lyrics, or Tom Lehrer's, I think simplicity is a good way to go, in vocabulary and verse form: the Kipling you've been looking at has that sort of structure, hasn't it? And also the Stevenson?