Comp. 3428 was inspired by Rose Ruane’s Larkin/Shelley mash-up (many thanks to Bill Greenwell for flagging this up):
They Oz you up, your Mandyias.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They give you vast and trunkless legs
A sunken shattered visage too.
But they were Ozzed up in their turn
By Mandyias upon the sand
Who half the time had wrinkled lips
And half in sneering cold command.
Oz hands on Mandyias to man.
Like mighty works atop a shelf
Look on them early as you can
Ye mighty and despair yourself.
You were invited to create a fusion of two poems of your choosing. Some came out more like one poem commenting on another but that was OK. I’m very sorry not to have room for Paul Freeman, D.A. Prince, Elizabeth Conquest, Nick Syrett, Nicholas Lee, Elizabeth Kay and others. The £25 vouchers go to the following.
Had we mome raths enough, and time,
Your mimsy gimblings were no crime.
The Jubjub bird you’d try to catch,
Whilst I pursued the Bandersnatch.
But uffishly I think I see
Time’s frumious chariot after me!
The tulgey wood’s a whiffling place.
They burble there, but don’t embrace.
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Says snicker-snacking leads to shame,
But beamish lady, be assured
I’ve a galumphing vorpal sword,
So let’s be frabjous while we may,
Come to my arms, calloo callay!
Though the sun’s race we cannot block,
We’ll chortle at the Jabberwock.
Brian Murdoch (Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’/Lewis Carroll, ‘Jabberwocky’)
Miss J. Hunter Dunn, Miss J. Hunter Dunn
is taking a break from the Aldershot sun.
Grown tired of the tennis and that subaltern fellow,
She saunters through shade cast by woodland so yellow.
The road she has taken soon branches in two
Leaving Joan Hunter Dunn quite unsure what to do.
The left fork? The right fork? It’s so hard to choose,
Yet each seems delightful, what has she to lose?
Both paths curve away through the lush undergrowth.
Oh, if she had the Hillman, she’d travel them both!
With the speed of a swallow, with the grace of a boy,
She decides on the route that she knows will bring joy.
For she’s bored of these woods, where the leaves are half-dead,
And of beastly mosquitos unwittingly fed.
She has young men to dance with, and tennis to win!
She goes back to the golf club for lime juice and gin.
Matt Quinn (John Betjeman, ‘A Subaltern’s Lovesong’/Robert Frost, ‘The Road Not Taken’)
I, being born with talent, and distressed
By all the red wheelbarrows of your kind,
Have lied, pretended, still pretend, to find
Your poems bold and vibrant, well expressed.
Though, actually, your so-called verse, designed
To make a proper poet lose her mind,
Does, I’m afraid, in all ways, fail my test.
Yet how I fancy you. Oh, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain!
Spring, summer, fall… I shall spend each new season
Making excuses for you. All in vain.
I find your six-pack insufficient reason
For rhyme-less farm equipment in the rain.
Sophie Hannah (Edna St Vincent Millay meets William Carlos Williams)
It was an Ancient Mariner
Who went to Innisfree,
And in a pleasant sunny glade
Was savaged by a bee.
He snatched the crossbow from his back
And shot the creature dead.
Its angry fellows formed a cloud
That swarmed about his head.
But, lightning-swift, his arrows flew
To pierce each apian forehead.
Then I arose, bean-pole in hand,
And cursed a deed so horrid:
‘You apicidal Mariner,
You daft, demented sot!
My bee-loud glade is silent now –
You’ve killed the bloody lot!’
Brian Allgar (‘The Ancient Mariner’, Coleridge/‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, Yeats)
Whose goods these are I think I know:
I left Nineveh six weeks ago.
That sweet white wine slips down a dream;
Apes are a different matter though.
My little tug thinks it extreme
To pull a blessed quinquereme,
Galleon and coaster for forty days,
Which could go under their own steam.
Something must be out of phase
If all those scurvy sailors laze,
While if I hear one more damn peacock
I’ll batter it with cheap tin trays.
Still, I have amethysts in stock
And chests of moidores to unlock;
But leagues to go before I dock.
And leagues to go before I dock.
David Shields (Robert Frost, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’/John Masefield, ‘Cargoes’)
‘We were an owl and a pussycat
And a cursèd pea-green boat
And a stormy sea’ – Thus hooted she
Her manic anecdote:
‘He whinged away for a year and a day,
Then it grew wondrous foggy.
The thunder roared, the sky loomed grey
And I sang to the moany moggy.
Then I looked up to the stars above,
To the sea, becalmed and flat,
By the light of the moon, with my harpoon
I shot the pussycat!
The sea did foam, the winds did howl,
The heavens stormed their warning;
A sadder and a wiser owl
I woke the morrow morning.’
David Silverman (‘The Rime of the Ancient Owl’, Lear/Coleridge)
No. 3431: Elementary
You are invited to submit a passage in which Sherlock Holmes solves one of the great mysteries of our time (150 words maximum). Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by midday on 29 December.
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