The scissors-and-paste work involved in this, though laborious, is easy enough; what is difficult is to avoid sliding into nonsense. The trick is, in Dryden’s phrase, to ‘deviate into sense’ as often as possible. John C.H. Mounsey began promisingly: ‘I met a traveller from an antique land,/ A cricket cap was on his head./ “Hold off! Unhand me, grey-beard loon!/ Charge for the guns!” he said’, but lost the plot afterwards. Coincidence corner: two of you used the first line of ‘Ozymandias’ as an opener, and two others did the same with ‘Boys and girls, come out to play’. What are the odds against that? The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to Richard Ellis, who took fair advantage of dispensing with rhyme.
Oft in the stilly night
Ere on my bed my limbs I lay
I think continually of those who were truly great:
About Miss Edith Gee,
Her little loose hands, and drooping Victorian shoulders:
Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee;
Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant,
A heavily-built Falstaffian man
Thundering for money at a poet’s door:
He was not of an age, but for all time;
Job Davies, eighty-five,
An old, mad, blind, despised and dying King,
Yet on he fares, by my own heart inspired.
I see most clearly poor Miss Loo,
A calf’s brown eyes and sturdy light-brown limbs,
And not waving but drowning.
Richard EllisThe glow of porcelain
In various bogus Tudor bars
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone.
I smelled the mildew in those swags of plush.
My mind was going numb,
Pushed slightly by the red and blue flowers.
It was evening all afternoon.
Strolling, I yammered metaphysics with Abramowitz,
Hungry for tomatoes and apples;
His sorrow was as true as bread.
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted.
The red eyes of rabbits
Faded in front of me — The next instant
Somebody’s done for.
G.M. DavisTell me not here, it needs not saying,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed;
All these I better in one general best —
Love in her eyes sits playing.
Ask me no more, where Jove bestows
The common fate of all things rare:
On the chalk downland bare,
An unofficial English rose.
Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind:
Thy face I only care to see.
Shall I not excluded be,
By nature, reason, learning, blind?
As me no more: the moon may draw the sea,
And after many a summer dies the swan;
So death doth touch the Resurrection.
The world is all too wide for thee.
Martin WoodheadSome day I shall rise and leave my friends,
Turn round and round:
And so it ends.
No sound.
Be near me when I fade away
(Darkness there and nothing more):
Beat on my roof at midnight, or by day,
And knock on the door.
There are cries in the dark in the night;
The unjust walk the earth.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight —
Death and birth.
If indeed I am a soul
Is difficult to learn:
All are but parts of one stupendous whole —
Everything will return.
Bill GreenwellHome they brought her warrior dead;
And, ghastly through the drizzling rain,
Were Cousin Mary, Little Fred,
Stretched upon the cumbered plain,
And there she wept and sighed full sore
As the hope-hour stroked its sum,
Nameless here for evermore,
Chewing a wad of scented gum.
She stood breast-high amid the corn
Fair fa’ your honest sonsie face!
Two blissful twins are to be born,
Jostling by dark intrigue for place.
‘Double, double, toil and trouble?
Melting in the light of day,
Life is mostly froth and bubble ...
Come, dear children, let us away!’
Godfrey BullardIt is a beauteous evening, calm and free.
The tortoise here and elephant unite,
Crouched like two bulls locked horn and horn in fight.
Two fairer birds I yet did never see.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight.
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
All new successions to the forms they wear —
Oh! Is it weed, or fish, or floating hair?
When you are old and grey and full of sleep
At the first turning of the second stair,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
When hot for certainties in this our life,
Better to err with Pope than shine with Pye.
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.
Now more than ever seems it rich to die.
(Methinks I might recover by and by.)
Ray KelleyNo. 2468: Rip Van Winkle
You fall asleep today and wake up 20 years hence. You are invited to report your impressions without moving from the place where you awoke. Maximum 150 words. Entries to ‘Competition No. 2468’ by 2 November.