Basil Ransome-Davies What are they concealing, those whiskers That beardies who grow them embrace, Those uberous bristles, self-seeding as thistles, Which camouflage half of a face?
Is it merely a shortage of jawline, A wish to look sage and mature Or hoping to balance that elegant valance, A stiffly upstanding coiffure?
Do they feel, in the depth of their mirrors, That beards raise their status among us? A curious fetish, so very Keith Flettish, To fashion a cult of face-fungus.
When I read that the man of the moment Is grossly hirsute I say ‘tosh!’, Lip loftily curling and fingertips twirling My Errol Flynn pencil moustache.
Bill Greenwell Happy the facially hirsute, So warm and so manly, so snug, With their features, as ’twere, in a fur suit, With their over-lips covered with rug —
You’d all love to own one, confess it, For a beard is so fully enjoyed — From the glorious mass of a Blessed, To the nervously kempt of a Freud,
From the very firm chinwag, a Lincoln, To the whiskery lengths of Lao Tzu — There are several styles that bear thinking: Go, find the style perfect for you!
Perhaps you’ll be shot through with sable, Perhaps you’ll be straggly and careless: Either way you’ll disable the fable That it’s sexy to walk around hairless.
S.E.G. Hopkin I’ve cleared the obstacles that filled my path: I’ve married them, or stabbed them in the back. The throne of Egypt’s now within my grasp, Now there is only one thing that I lack.
Give me my beard, my mark of royal might, That gilded wonder, elegant and thin. And while one diadem adorns my brow, Another shall descend beneath my chin. For beards, when not luxuriant and wild But neatly trussed and trimmed in golden bands Declare the patriarchy’s right divine In every age to dominate our lands.
Give me my beard, the bauble that proclaims Pharaoh Hatshepsut first among her kin. For all my royalty depends upon That phallic symbol strapped beneath my chin.
Noel Petty To get one scruple off my chest I must declare an interest: I own a beard, to me most dear, Now in its 39th Great Year.
By subtle arts of snip and trim I mould it to my current whim. I can be any one I please From Marx to Freud to Socrates.
Some hint that it’s a screen wherein I hide a weakness of the chin. I hint that logic of that kind May hide a weakness of the mind.
‘Why do you grow it?’ others say. ‘I don’t,’ I smile. ‘It makes its way Needing no peat, no blood & bone, So why do you hack down your own?’
Brian Allgar I long to sport a lavish ginger beard, Luxuriant, flamboyant, curled and plaited, Though heartless people tell me I’d look weird, And that the thing would grow unkempt and matted.
Yet still I yearn to deck my hairless chin With something bushy, jolly, not severe, That little birds could build their nest within, The spitting image of old Edward Lear.
In Spring, they’d mate, and eggs would fill the nest, Then fledglings would appear, to chirp and cheep. How pleasant I would find each tiny guest, How comfortably each of them would sleep!
But Mother says, in tones that I find churlish, ‘My dear, a beard just isn’t very girlish.’
Mike Morrison What is it with you poor pogonophobes, Did someone cauterise your frontal lobes? The hours and days, the weeks of life you waste, The nicks and cuts inflicted in your haste, The stinging styptic pencil for relief — Your crass inanity’s beyond belief. Pink chins and chops, malevolent ‘number ones’ Adopted by your disaffected sons. Never forget the world’s proud paradigms, Role models formed for us in former times: George Bernard Shaw, Guevara, D.H. Lawrence, To whom the cut-throat was a dire abhorrence; The Duke of Kent, no less, dear Hemingway, Darwin. I rest my case, no more to say. Consider this, you pallid boys new-mown — Real men bear beards and true testosterone.
Your next challenge is to describe your idea of heaven, or hell, in verse (16 lines maximum). Please email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 25 February.
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