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.
The post Spectator competition winners: a response to Kipling’s ‘If’ and other poems appeared first on The Spectator.
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