In Competition No. 3094 you were invited to submit a ‘Sonnet Found in a Deserted Mad House’. G.K. Chesterton once observed that ‘poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese’. Well, not the anonymous author of the curious poem that inspired this challenge: line eight of ‘Sonnet Found in a Deserted Mad House’, which appeared in A Nonsense Anthology (1915), edited by Carolyn Wells, refers to ‘…mournful mouths filled full of mirth and cheese…’
 
Food featured strongly in your excellent and varied compositions (a boiled egg — two mentions — artichokes, yogurt, custard pies…). It was tricky to nominate winners, but after much prevarication I settled on the seven below, who take £20 each.
 

Wild ayes and noes resound inside my brain
Indicative of something I suppose,
Who has it? Do the noes or ayes? Who knows?
To me the ayes and noes are all insane.
I had a deal; a deal I had for sure,
The only deal that dealt with all ahead,
I put it forward. ‘Here’s the deal,’ I said,
A deal I’d offered many times before.
Now ‘deal, no deal’ with ‘ayes and noes’ all scream
Like frenzied ghosts inside my addled mind
Yet, running free through fields of gold, I find
Cold comfort in a strange recurring dream:
I gloat while all my foes and so-called friends
Fall on their swords and meet their grizzly ends.
Alan Millard

 
My face is smeared with cadmium, ochre, chrome,
I eat a range of paints, but who can blame me?
my brain’s confused and I am far from home
and mad, incarcerated in Saint Rémy.
Although you’ll see I’m parted from one ear
(the drastic outcome of self-mutilation)
the circling crows I yet am doomed to hear
betwixt the bouts of darkness and elation.
In lucid spells I paint with manic speed
more than a hundred paintings — none will sell —
a blaze of sunflowers, cornfields, yet I heed
a sombre truth, and one I know too well:
 
When I am dead and gone, my frail flesh rotten,
I and my art will surely be forgotten.
Sylvia Fairley
 
What happened to the other lunatics?
The men in white have taken them away,
Those broken men destroyed by politics.
‘Leave now! No deal!’ they shrieked. ‘Oh, wait!
Let’s stay!’
 
I think this place was once (or am I dreaming?)
The House of Commons. Now it’s simply called
‘Theresa’s Loony Bin’. She went out screaming;
‘Just one more vote, the twenty-third,’ she bawled.
 
They took them one by one, enraged or passive,
Still babbling, drooling, from the nearest exit
 
To God knows where, those intellects once massive,
Now driven to insanity by Brexit.
 
These lines must be my final words to you;
The men in white are coming for me too.
Brian Allgar
 
The spaceship will be coming for us soon.
There can’t be any other explanation
For everything that feels so out of tune
About this planet Earth, about this nation.
It’s waiting somewhere out beyond the moon.
Unseen, it boggles my imagination.
I’m like a cartoon with a Wow! balloon,
In love with my own keen anticipation.
In June and January, night and noon,
We feed on potions and disinformation.
The aliens are coming for us soon.
First Contact is our holy aspiration.
The world will wonder where and how we went
As we embark on infinite ascent.
Chris O’Carroll

 
It’s manifold, the state of otherness,
As numerous as stars, as wide as space.
Galactically dispersed, it spreads apace,
Making for hardcore connoisseurs of stress.
We have, it’s claimed, the science to assess
The true pathology of any case —
The mute grief-monkey or the cackling face —
But lunacy is anybody’s guess.
The wards are maps of undigested pain,
Its diagnosis I can only call
A soreness of the soul. Time and again
I bang my head against a mental wall,
Shamed by the purity of the insane.
I’m the head doctor, madder than them all.
Basil Ransome-Davies

 
The curfew tolls the knell of passing day.
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend
Shall with their goat feet dance the antic hay
Mad as the sea and wind when both contend.
The moving finger writes and having writ
It makes allowance for their doubting too.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
A hair perhaps divides the false and true.
Nature I loved and next to nature art.
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.
To raise the genius and to mend the heart
Wilt thou forgive the sin in which I run?
That cannot be; since I am still possess’d;
For some we loved, the loveliest and the best.
Philip Roe

 
The madhouse is deserted now. They’ve gone
Into — what do they call it? — the recess?
They’ve cut the cleaning staff, so I’m alone.
Here’s my report on cleaning up the mess:
A single sock? It’s funny what you find.
Nine sandwiches. A boiled egg (free range?).
A pair of wellies! Who left them behind?
Thirteen pounds forty-six, all in loose change.
Six half-sucked lozenges down by the mace,
Some crumpled knickers? Well, they do sit late.
Old order papers all over the place,
With rude words on them. Oh, a dinner plate.
Honourable Members leave a lot of trash.
Like them it’s in the bin. I’ve kept the cash.
Brian Murdoch

No 3097: the full english

You are invited to submit a poem in the style of a well-known poet (please specify) on the subject of Englishness. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 1 May.