Spectator competition winners: a response to Kipling’s ‘If’ and other poems

In Competition No. 3273, you were invited to supply a poem addressing a well-known poem of your choice. In a keenly contested week, honourable mentions go to Robin Hill’s response to John McCrae’s 1915 rondeau ‘In Flanders Fields’ (which was rejected for publication by this magazine), Chris Ramsey and Alex Steelsmith. The winners take £20.

“If you can stroke your chin for hours and hours,

While handing out your worldly ponderings

As sterling wisdom, knowledge that empowers

And truths that point you to the heart of things;

If you can make a point-blank affirmation

Then undercut it with a get-out clause,

Or downplay thought and wild imagination,

Dynamics that can open magic doors:

 

If you can praise the taciturn and stoic,

The spirit of the booted and the spurred,

As vital attributes of the heroic,

Yet pay your tributes to the common herd;

If you can play the trimmer, that will aid you.

The whole world will be at your beck and call.

No summit of ambition will evade you.

And yet somehow it’s all conditional.

Basil Ransome-Davies/‘If’

“Dear William, I’m the Highland Lass

who sang as you looked on

and sat upon your poet’s arse

in shade upon the lawn

 

and made as if I were a bird

who chirped the whole day long,

and listening, your heart was stirred

to hear my warbled song.

 

Just for the record, William, I

was working for my bread,

and sang so that I would not cry

or wish that I were dead.

 

To you, it seems, I was a prop,

not someone’s wife or daughter.

You wrote. Not once, though, did you stop

to offer me some water.

Robert Schechter/‘The Solitary Reaper’

“I, too, have seen thee oft — a cunning gaze

lingering too long as I, relaxing sprawl

carefree and confident. The light wind plays

a rondo through my hair. And you? For all

your fancy’s phrasing drugs are on your mind,

and drink: go press that cider on your own.

Keep those last oozings to yourself; your stale

romantic leerings merely underlined

your stalker-instincts, voyeur, and your tone.

Too oft I’ve seen you, now your cover’s blown.

Your look? It’s now so passé and so male.

D.A. Prince/‘Ode to Autumn’

“That portrait? It’s Ferrara. Here’s the thing:

He was the kind of Duke deserved to swing

From a lamp-post; who would suit a city wall

Upon a gleaming spike. His charmless drawl

Betrayed him – when he made his idle boast

About his bronze, well, frankly, he was toast –

I had him in his orchard, pressed his grapes,

Gave him a wink when I was forced to traipse

That marriage aisle. He thought me airy-fairy,

But at my prompting, local carabinieri

Removed him to their dungeons, on the charge

Of murdering his first. Is he at large?

Why, no, Sir! All that irony, so subtle,

As he thought, hardly helped his poor rebuttal

Of hiring hit-men. Clod! So out of touch!

Ah, here’s its pair. He called it ‘My Old Duch’.

Bill Greenwell/‘My Last Duchess’

“Had we this world but little time

Impatience, Andrew, were no crime.

An evening out would do to praise

My verse and down my cleavage gaze.

An hour or so to get undressed

And thirty minutes all the rest.

You’d go as quickly as you came

And other men would prove the same.

 

But soon begins our lives’ next stage,

The slow expanse of middle age;

And, as my willing soul aspires

To gratify its real desires,

A quaint and fine and private place

A lawful husband will embrace.

We cannot make desire abate.

But, dearest, we can make it wait.

Philip Roe/‘To His Coy Mistress’

“Hail to thee, blithe budgie!

Lark thou never wert,

perching on thy mirror-swing,

thy perky tail alert.

Shelley claimed a skylark’s song

inspired his ode majestic,

the truth is he confused his birds;

the wild with the domestic.

Thy homely dulcet chirp inspired

a poet of the age,

that soaring, sweet, triumphal chant

hailed from a grit-strewn cage.

’Twas not the lark, nor nightingale

that did such rapture bringest,

but one small sprite, the budgie;

may its chirrups ever singest.

Janine Beacham/‘To the Skylark’

“When you are old, more doolally than now,

Still living in some wild, poetic trance,

Lost in your world of magical romance

And too forgetful to remember how

You irked me with your sickly, mawkish rhymes

Believing, when I’m older too, that I

Would sit beside the fire with a sigh

And dream of how I looked in former times

Or that, of all the many men I knew,

You, only, saw the pilgrim soul in me

And that no man, apart from you, could be

More fond of me; well, be that false or true,

I’d say I lived on Venus, you on Mars,

You never had the charm to win my heart,

And, knowing we were always poles apart,

I’m glad you’re hid amid a host of stars!

Alan Millard/‘When You Are Old’

No. 3276: erratum

You are invited to supply an extract from the memoir of a well-known celebrity (please specify) with some unfortunate misprints. Please email entries of up to 150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by noon on 16 November.