In Competition No. 3344 you were invited to submit a poem expressing feelings – positive or negative – about a poetic form. The standard was impressively high, with near-misses for Max Ross, Sylvia Fairley and David Silverman, whose entry ended by rendering Paradise Lost in a single haiku (‘Angel turns nasty/ Temptation in the garden/ A big mistake. Huge’). All below win a well-deserved £25.

The way its rigid pattern goes,

The triolet repeats a lot.

A canny reader quickly knows

The way its rigid pattern goes.

It’s an enchanting form to those

Whose memory’s completely shot.

The way its rigid pattern goes,

The triolet repeats. A lot.

You get to hear this first line thrice.

And this one is repeated, too.

In triolets, that’s not a vice.

You get to hear this first line thrice!

Familiarity feels nice,

Providing comfort. Lucky you!

You get to hear this first line thrice.

And this one is repeated, too.

Max Gutmann

Yes, it brought me fame and fortune,

But it’s horribly pervasive,

And I wish I’d never nicked it

From that wretched Kalevala!

Trouble is, trochaic rhythm

Never seems to want to leave you,

Till you cannot form a sentence,

Even talking to the milkman:

‘Leave an extra pint tomorrow

And I’ll settle up on Friday.’

If I try to write a sonnet,

Or some stuff in terza rima,

In comes Hia-bloody-watha’s

Tumpty tumpty tumpty tumpty!

Poets should from me take warning:

Trochees turn your brain to jelly.

Brian Murdoch

A villanelle is rigid in its form,

With five tercets, and quatrain to conclude:

It worships repetition as the norm.

In poetry, it’s true, one must conform,

But this feels like a supper badly stewed:

A villanelle is rigid in its form:

Good poetry makes waves, linguistic storms,

But not the villanelle, with lines renewed:

It worships repetition as the norm.

A poet knows she’s failed if readers yawn,

And see her as a fixed, unchanging dude:

A villanelle is rigid in its form.

For Speccie comps it’s too long to perform:

To 19 lines it’s resolutely glued:

It worships repetition as the norm.

So, how it ends, I’ll leave you uninformed…

Nicholas Lee

Rumpety pumpety

Dactyls when doublesome

Typically trip off the

Orator’s tongue.

Rhythmically rigorous

Characteristically

Fun for all ages and

Better when sung.

Joe Houlihan

Adept at prose, I strained to be poetic,

Given the talent Erato releases.

The wish was there, the outcome quite pathetic.

Failure. My ego crumbled into pieces.

I sadly lacked the Whitman-Ginsberg touch,

Unvarnished wit. I needed some prosthesis.

Disabled at free verse, I had to clutch

Whatever aids could lift me from the mire.

There, rhyme and metre acted as a crutch.

Dante, you played a blinder to inspire

Whole centuries of greats and not-so-greats

But seldom the insipid or the dire.

The chain of terza rima calibrates

Infinity, so when you hit the wall

Be thankful for the impulse it creates.

Relax and finish with a dying fall.

Basil Ransome-Davies

Oh what a lovely sonnet this one is –

How gloriously, in only fourteen lines

It somehow, without fuss or strain, combines

Its honest wisdom with linguistic fizz.

How surely it from line to line progresses,

With subtle tact approaching the sublime –

How neatly every line-end finds a rhyme.

How deep the aesthetic issues it addresses.

How nice a man its poet has to be

To make a work so rich and so impressive,

So full of thoughts, yet focused, not digressive;

It is a work of solid quality –

So neatly made! And notice how it flows

Towards its perfect and so poignant close.

George Simmers

When normal folk wrote formal verse

I heard a poet say,

Beware a fast-approaching curse;

Free verse will soon hold sway.

All formal rules will be destroyed

And cause poetic blight.

Free verse is not the real McCoy

But it’s easier to write.

I found its ‘freedoms’ so perverse

That I forbore to try it.

So I’m still writing formal verse

Though fewer folk now buy it.

Today free verse is just a joke

To those of us who know it’s

Clearly made too many folk

Believe that they are poets.

Martin Parker

No. 3347: Nursery crimes

You are invited to submit a nursery rhyme written in the style of a hard-boiled crime novel. Please email entries of up to 16 lines or 150 words to competition@spectator.co.uk by 24 April.