In Competition No. 3332 you were invited to supply, in verse form, a retraction of beliefs previously believed in passionately.

You weren’t obliged to step into the shoes of a real poet but many chose to and some smart, entertaining about-turns included Robert Schechter’s ‘Palinode on a Grecian Urn’:

‘Truth is beauty,’
I said smugly,
but lived to find
that truth is ugly.

Other standout performers included Janine Beacham, George Simmers and Alex Steelsmith, and they were unlucky to miss out on a place in the winners’ enclosure. Those entries that made the final cut are printed below and earn their authors £25.

The world is charged with grandeur we applaud,
The sheen and perfume of its sky, sea, soil.
To all that drones is nature’s spree the foil.
Our world’s most ordinary when most odd.
Theistic explanations, though, defraud
When we to truth aspire to live loyal,
So shrug off any supernatural coil,
Acknowledge that our former faith was flawed.

In hymning nature, let us be content
To credit this world’s swinging as it swings
To true effects, not myths our hearts invent.
The mind to fables and traditions clings,
Which it is now essential to repent,
For we know we know real from conjured things.

Chris O’Carroll/Gerard Manley Hopkins

Great Schuman Plan designed to mean
That never could a single nation
Ignite the hell the world had seen
Through steel production domination.
A common market, fairly ordered,
Bright and starry flag unfurled:
States united, now unbordered,
Trade goods not blows – oh, brave Old World!
But then the bureaucrats took hold,
Dictating rules de haut en bas,
All micromanaged, court-controlled,
The centralising gone too far.
Hence Brussels-Strasbourg back and forth,
The visionary myopia,
The South exploited by the North,
A sadly failed eutopia.

W.J. Webster

Why struggle painfully? Why ever fight
A destiny you know is hard and fast?
Go gentle, boyo, into that good night.

Consider this: each breath may be your last.
And guess what happens then? An end to pain.
So slip away. Accept your life is past.

It does no good to splutter and complain,
Or pen defiant poems packed with hwyl.
Resistance to finality’s insane.

Think kindly of the terminally ill
Lacking a future. Why should they resist?
Mortality exceeds the human will.

Nobody but a futile optimist
Would rage against the dying of the light.
When I wrote that I must have been well pissed.

Basil Ransome-Davies/Dylan Thomas

Oh I believed and fully comprehended
how Fukuyama’s view, in ’92,
showed history’s violence and wars had ended
and civilised society won through.

Oh I believed that liberal consensus
would be the true – the only – way ahead
and peace and harmony would surely fence us
from bloodshed, slaughter and the piled-up dead.

Oh I believed that Progress was no longer
an uphill scramble, faltering and slow,
but now had reached the peak – and all the stronger
for every bloody lesson learned below –

and it was nearly here. Yes, I believed
a kinder future, nurturing the frail,
the world had worked so hard for was achieve
and somehow we had grasped its Holy Grail.

D.A. Prince

I used to think that I was pretty hot;
Six days to make a universe? High-five!
With stars and planets, galaxies, the lot,
And all the creepy-crawly things alive:
Bacteria, amoebae, dinosaurs,
Then mammals, then … and so on down the line.
I worked like hell to finish all my chores,
And when I looked around, it all seemed fine.

But then I started doubting what I’d done:
Inventing syphilis and leprosy,
Creating cancer – was it just for fun?
Increasingly, I don’t believe in Me.
So much that’s bad, so many chances missed –
Today, I’m just another atheist…

Brian Allgar

I once believed in Santa Claus,
But at the age of nine or ten,
I found that all the High Street stores
Had seedy Santa-suited men
With crummy gifts and beery smells,
And roving, disconcerting paws.
Their grottoes were my childhood hells…
I don’t believe in Santa Claus.

I once believed in global peace,
Dependent on democracy:
Naively thinking wars would cease,
That we would live in harmony.
Democracy’s now out of date,
The planet’s on a fragile lease,
And destined soon to detonate…
I don’t believe in global peace.

C. Paul Evans

No. 3335: mixed messages

You are invited to submit an acrostic poem for Valentine’s Day whose acrostic contains an un-Valentinish sentiment. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 31 January./>