For Competition 3454 you were invited to encapsulate a well-known poem in four lines. I found this entertaining parlour game in E.O. Parrott’s splendid How to be Well Versed in Poetry, which includes this cracker from Ron Rubin, one-time veteran of these pages:
Regarding Slough, Berks.,
This poet remarks:
‘This town makes me vomit –
I wish they would bomb it!’
Paul Freeman earns an honourable mention for distilling ‘Daffodils’ into four words. Richard Warren, Mark Wallace, Nicholas Whitehead, Simon Godziek and Liz Moore also stood out. The winners earn a £10 John Lewis voucher per encapsulation printed.
Don’t be coy, babe,
Life must fade;
Marvell’s tip
For getting laid.
Janine Beacham (Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’)
Not given to reasoning why,
not choosing to make a reply,
though someone had blundered, on rode the six hundred
and did what they did, which was die.
Robert Schechter (Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’)
I’ve written of urns that are Grecian
Upon which no acts find completion.
My heart breaks in two for those Greeks in the loo
Who are frozen in time mid-excretion!
Robert Schechter (Keat’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’)
There stood two roads, and just one me.
I wasn’t sure which way to go.
I peered as far as eyes could see,
Then: ‘Eaney, meaney, miney, moe.’
Max Gutmann (Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’)
Lured by a snake
A couple break
An interdiction
Earning instant eviction
Basil Ransome-Davies (Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’)
Mom and dad will hand on neuroses
Like curses not blessings they wish you.
Life’s never a basket of roses.
Die soon and without any issue.
Basil Ransome-Davies (Larkin’s ‘This Be the Verse’)
I wish I could have flourished
As a misanthrope contrarian;
But those are undernourished:
So, a tweedy old librarian.
Frank Upton (Larkin’s ‘Toads’)
feeling simply comes before
anything penned in by punc
tuation. your kiss and laugh mean more
than all my lifeless mental bunk.
W.J. Webster (e.e. cummings, ‘since feeling is first’)
‘Eskimo Nell’ when printed in full
Is perpetual sexual action.
So this tale of our Nell when she’s out on the pull
Could be subject to total redaction.
Martin Parker (Anon’s ‘The Ballad of Eskimo Nell’)
I saw a lot of daffodils
Outdoors, when all alone;
It’s nice to think of them again
Indoors – still on my own
Nicholas Hodgson (Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’)
Winter. I lose hope completely.
Troubles will befall.
Hark! A thrush sings now so sweetly.
I’m hopeful, after all.
Roger Rengold (Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’)
Best view on Earth, this bridge surveys the scene
in Westminster – the morning sunlit sweep
across the Thames and city, all serene.
It’s at its best when everyone’s asleep.
D.A. Prince (Wordsworth’s ‘On Westminster Bridge’)
Nowhere-Man thin-hair man J. Alfred Prufrock,
Dawn-to-dusk ditherer, time out of joint,
Hot-wired for crisis on tea, cakes and ices;
Mermaids and beachcombing? Get to the point!
Mike Morrison (Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’)
Some angels thought that they’d rebel.
And got hurled headlong into hell.
God then made folk, but sad to tell,
They sinned, and got slung out as well.
Brian Murdoch (Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’
My flea-bite caused, when borne to you,
A haematological integration,
Yet though we mourn a death, this brew
Could lead, perchance, to copulation.
Sylvia Fairley (Donne’s ‘The Flea’)
Do not disdain the lives and work
Of humble folk, but have good cheer.
For high and mighty though you be,
Everyone must end up here.
Richard Wyndham (Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’)
Crying Wolf was this girl’s sin, a lying little maid
Who, though her house was not ablaze, called out the fire brigade,
But when a real fire threatened her, her call was not believed,
And ending up as ashes, her comeuppance she received.
Alan Millard (Belloc’s ‘Matilda)
The average male
(By which I refer to a human possessing testicles)Will generally fail
To make advances to a female who wears spectacles.
George Simmers (Parker’s ‘News Item’)
No. 3457: Elemental
You are invited to submit a weather forecast in verse. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to competition@spectator.co.uk by midday on 1 July.
The very sad news reached us this week that Bill Greenwell, a regular winner in the Spectator competition for over four decades, has died. His friend David Silverman (another regular competition entrant) speaks for us all when he writes: ‘Bill had a wonderfully creative intelligence and also a sense of the absurd and his poetry was so inventive and witty. Apart from his parodies and light-hearted verse, he also published several serious collections. A true poet. But above all he had a sensitive, kind and engaging personality. I will miss him terribly as a friend and I know he will be missed enormously by his loving family and friends. Such a sad loss. Thursday mornings will never be quite the same…’.
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