In Competition No. 3280, you were invited to submit an updating of W.H. Auden’s ‘Night Mail’ entitled ‘Email’.

‘Night Mail’ was written to accompany a section of the excellent 1936 documentary about the London to Glasgow Postal Special directed by Basil Wright and Harry Watt (who described Auden as looking like a ‘half-witted Swedish deckhand’). Auden used a stopwatch as he was writing to ensure that each snippet of spoken verse fit the shot on which it commented. ‘We were experimenting to see whether poetry could be used in films,’ he said, ‘and I think we showed it could.’

A commendation to Ann Drysdale, Sylvia Fairley and Frank Upton, who accompanied his entry with the observation that in ‘Night Mail’ the poet’s first thoughts – ‘bringing the cheque and the postal order’ – are of money. The winners, printed below, pocket £25 each.

This is the email surfing the ether,
Cool from the Arctic or hot from Ibiza,
Email from loved ones, email from creeps,
Some to delete, some filed for keeps,
Email that greets you with Ciao or Buongiorno,
Email that flogs Californian porno,
Miserable memos, or, very much cheerier,
Catfishing scammers from coastal Nigeria.
Client to server, server to client,
Hypertext transfer that must be compliant,
Protocol-perfect, or else, out of kilter,
It won’t even fill up your spam-hungry filter.
Round the clock email, any old hour,
Seducing the eye with an untoward power –
You biro-mad tyros, desist from your scrawl,
For the postie won’t knock on your front door at all.

Bill Greenwell

Out in the ether the emails are flying,
Always delivering, distance defying;
Leaving sad snail mail to dwindle and sink,
Wiping out envelopes, paper and ink;
There’s no competition because they are free –
But that’s at the cost of what contact should be.
Caps and emojis, a whimsical font
Are not the expressions of feeling we want.
But all the bland sameness and boxfuls of spam
Are nothing compared to the fear of a scam.
Behind every message there might lie a crook
Who’s using a link as a barbed phishing hook:
Baited with cunning, this evil device
Has landed its victims before they think twice.
Alas, that’s the email crossing the border
From gadget to portal for moral disorder.

W.J. Webster

These are the emails that fill up my inbox,
Pitches from drug vendors, pitches for detox,
Greetings from princes with millions to share,
Adverts for lotions to regrow my hair,
Vanity press bids to publish my masterpiece,
Messages in re. a genital size increase,
Emails from creditors, emails from editors,
Straight-faced good wishes from fellow competitors,
Pleas from an earnest assortment of charities
Working to smooth out life’s unfair disparities,
Emails retailing conspiracist views
Concerning elites who manipulate news,
Emails that dangle steep discounts on booze
As lures to sign up for a holiday cruise,
Messages all of which suit me just fine –
Life might feel friendless and empty offline.

Chris O’Carroll

This is the email of Microsoft, Yahoo,
iCloud and Gmail, conveyed to O’ahu,
Romford, St George’s, Palermo, Tahiti.
Onward she forges, determined and speedy,
Beaming through conduits fibrous and optic
Greetings in Inuit, Serbian, Coptic;
Comments of every conceivable attitude –
Homage, irreverence, peevishness, gratitude;
Pixelled dispatches deplorably written;
Pictures attached – the adorable kitten,
Gerbil or shih tzu; the cheery emoticon;
Verbal jujitsu, rhetorical Shotokan;
Messages fonted in Times and Verdana
Quoting Vedanta and citing arcana.
This is electrical mail; she disperses
Missives eclectic, and metrical verses.

Alex Steelsmith

This is the email just in from Nigeria –
Keyboard to server – O blessèd I.T.!
An unknown relation has died from diphtheria:
Claim your inheritance, ASAP!
Click here! You’ve been chosen and congratulations!
Get a quote now – no deposit required!
Click here for cheap burial plans and cremations
And release your equity, now you’ve retired.
Accident? Injury? Medical negligence?
Claim compensation: it’s no win, no fee!
Been trying to reach you and – what a coincidence!
You’ve won a world cruise – and the booze is all free!
Have sex with Natalya! She’s hot, from Estonia –
Click on the link if you want to see more!
Send us a grand and Natalya will phone ya.
Oh email! Just how did we manage before?

David Silverman

This is the email hitting the server,
Pinging in spam urging bitcoin fervour.
Missives from trolls, missives with LOLs
Ads for Viagra and sleek sex dolls.
Unending clickbait insisting you look
At mail-order Russian, self-published book,
Written by robots in distant Wuhan
Arrayed to evade your security scan.
This is the email, mostly unwanted,
Full of emojis, crazily fonted,
All of it brash, much of it trash,
Some from Nigeria panning for cash.
Conspiracist bulletins pushing canards,
Perfunctory greetings typed in e-cards.
Ill-wishing phishers requiring deletion –
Postmen are history: blame this accretion.

Russell Chamberlain

No. 3283: tears for peers

You are invited to submit a poem entitled ‘A Peer’s Lament’. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 18 January.