In Competition No. 3336 you were invited to supply the story behind the composition of a famous poem.

This challenge drew a smart and diverse entry that proved tricky to whittle down to a prizewinning half-dozen. But after lengthy consideration, D.A. Prince, Brian Murdoch and Paul Voogt are awarded commendations and those printed below earn their authors £25 each.

Dear Marlowe, so, you want to write poems to impress the London girls. Well, sonnets are still hot with the nobility, but let me tell you, Kit, rural idylls are all the rage! Think cheeping birds, pastoral imagery, sexy allusions to hills and valleys. Passionate, liberal shepherds go down a treat. The ladies go mad for tanned, strapping country swains and romps in the hay. Aim for sunny springtime, lambs, frisking, frolicking. Add a May morning reference; every lass longs to play May Queen. Avoid blunt mentions of rams or tupping. Concentrate on wanton airs, dalliance, pleasures. Throw in a green cornfield, sweet lovers, the pretty ringtime, a hey nonino or two. Promise them pretty flowers, clothes made of gold, pure wool, silver dishes. They’ll be unlacing your breeches before you can say ‘codpiece’. Enjoy your fun, but don’t forget to finish writing those plays, you lusty alehead. Yours, Shakespeare.

Janine Beacham

Baltic Dry, we nicknamed the oldest shipping clerk in the Firm, partly after the maritime index of which he was a devotee, mostly on account of the tedium of his conversation, which began and ended with work. On the much-delayed occasion of his retirement, the question of a parting gift arose. None of us could recall his expressing a liking for anything other than impeccably alphabetised Letters of Credit, but a junior clerk, Chivers, recalled the old man, having not one whit of it in his deracinated soul, absolutely hated poetry. It proved surprisingly cheap to commission from a man named Masefield, a rising versifier of the day, a poem confected entirely from a slyly borrowed selection of Baltic Dry’s old Bills of Lading. Chivers read the poem, ‘Cargoes’, at the retirement presentation and the old man’s face, parchment-white with fury yet damp with nostalgic tears, was – well, poetry.

Adrian Fry

When a boy, Robert Browning was much fascinated by the arrival of post, and devised a game with two pals, Boris and Kirk, in which each raced to be the first to deliver some imaginary letters from Denmark Hill to Walworth, stopping off finally at a public house, The Pandolf, where lived a kind lady known locally as ‘My Old Duch’. All three rode their hobbyhorses at breakneck speed. After 15 minutes Kirk’s hobbyhorse snapped. ‘Keep going!’ shouted Robert. ‘We must bring the good news to Walworth!’ At Camberwell, Boris’s hobbyhorse also disintegrated. Whooping and yelling, Robert carried on all the way to The Pandolf, where he found the lady canoodling with a local artist called Frank, and not the slightest bit interested in Robert’s silly show of ‘feeding’ his ‘mount’ some ‘wine’. Robert imagined her being summarily executed. Years later, he adapted the tale as ‘My Last Duchess’.

Bill Greenwell

Davies just stood there, looking at me. I lectured him on fecklessness, reminded him I was a busy man with a property portfolio to manage. The Thomases, a credulous couple he’d somehow inveigled into paying his rent, tidying, even fashioning a wooden leg for the old lag, seemed in awe of the fellow. Despite his not being a rent-paying tenant, I told him straight. How there was no time to stand and stare. How gawping at grass and squirrels’ nuts wouldn’t get him anywhere. How does he respond? Twists my own words back at me in that got-up, declamatory voice poets favour. His verse seemed so pure an expression of his layabout credo, I knew it was the only thing in the house the Thomases hadn’t had a hand in. Transcribe it, I advised, and sell. Well, we did. Called it ‘Leisure’. He learned the difference between staring and seeing.

Russell Chamberlain

‘Henry, my people want you should branch out, trawl new oceans. Enough with the sea songs, no one beats “Drake’s Drum” now. Think Gentlemen – English cricket!’ The poet demurred. ‘Not my line, flannelled fools at public schools; alma mater, faux camaraderie, backstabbing, money-grabbing cynical scions of…’

The commissioning editor thumped his mahogany desk; needle-sharp pencils nervously quivered. ‘Mister Newbolt, you will me furnish me with the first draft of a piece wherein the virtues of civilised sportsmanship neatly dovetail with the horror, obscenity and chaos of modern warfare. Compare and contrast. You’re the scholar, dammit. Gimme top-notch imagery, high-end metaphor – “Breathless hush, last man in, play up” stuff. War is a game and sport’s just war by other means…
9 a.m. Monday!’ Newbolt sighed. ‘“Vitai Lampada” then.’ ‘Do what, Henry?’ ‘The Torch of Life’. ‘Yeah, whatever.’

Mike Morrison

Odd how the middle of nowhere transforms itself suddenly into the middle of everywhere. There’s a thought for a drowsy summer afternoon on the rails after that empty sunlit interval when we paused at a nondescript station, hearing our own mechanical racket accompanied by an all-enveloping clamour of birdsong. There was no human coming and going outside our windows, no event to give the scene an indelible character. And yet. The Gloucestershire countryside in that moment, generically green and pleasant, yet ever so specific in each detail, was utterly itself and at the same time entirely at one with nearby Oxfordshire as the region’s birds trilled the air of both counties. The name of the village stop is fading already behind us as the train makes its way across the landscape. Adlethorpe? Adlethwaite? Adleford? No. I don’t remember. Not to worry, one can look up such things easily enough.

Chris O’Carroll

No. 3339: murder they wrote

You are invited to submit a crime story in sonnet form. Please email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 28 February./>