For Competition 3391 you were invited to submit one of Keats’s odes rewritten as a sonnet or a limerick.
Four out of the five odes composed by Keats in the spring of 1819 feature in the winning line-up, as does ‘To Autumn’, written in September of that year. Once again there were many more winners than we have space for. A consolatory pat on the back to unlucky losers Benedict King, Duncan Forbes, Gail White, John Redmond, Jennifer Zhou, Iain Morley, David Cram and Mark Brown. The winners below earn a £25 John Lewis voucher.
It’s autumn, harvest-time, maturing sun,
Cue mellow fruitfulness, soft mists and bees,
Things ooze, swell, ripen, overflow and run,
Plump, sweet and sticky, plopping off the trees.
Personify the season; dreamy, hazy,
A drowsy gleaner watching cider ooze,
Asleep on furrows, poppy-drunk and lazy,
Thy hair soft-lifted as thou hast a snooze.
Forget the oft-euphoric songs of Spring,
Admire the sounds of autumn; lambs and gnats,
Migration-minded swallows twittering,
No need for blankets yet, nor thermostats.
How strange and how outlandish; Keats achieves
This ode without one word of falling leaves.
Janine Beacham
When life’s a bummer and you’re feeling blue
Don’t hit the bottle, binge on Valium
Or freak out using aconite and yew.
Self-poisoning is, like, insanely dumb:
It doubles your downbeat, depressive mood.
Better turn on to natural sounds and sights,
Like flowers or your squeeze’s pulchritude
The vibe there is a garden of delights.
Yet transcendental highs can never last.
Sooner or later circumstance will flip
A mind-blowing euphoria to the past;
You’re coming down. But that’s the total trip.
Pleasure is always tinctured with a pang
Of pure heartbreak, you dig – like Yin and Yang.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Poor piteous me, sunk in despair again,
Why can’t I be like you in seventh heaven?
I pine for some relief to ease my pain
While you soar skywards, singing on cloud seven.
O for some sweet elixir to disperse
My sorrows and transport me far from here
Where sad old men bemoan their lot and curse,
And all around seems colourless and drear.
Charmed by your song I fleetingly take wing
And briefly feel your merriment and mirth,
But my dejection clouds the song you sing
And all too soon I plummet back to earth,
Aye, back to earth where, bidding you farewell,
I wake or sleep, though which I cannot tell.
Alan Millard
Away with fairies – I’m that chap who scrooges
His idle hours, nothing in my noddle –
When all at once, in white, I see three stooges
Who want me to adopt a different model.
Less of this tempting spell of forty winks!
Love is the first one, she is frankly phwoar;
The second is Ambition. What a minx.
The last is Mistress Poesy. Je t’adore!
But there again, I love the Land of Nod,
The wooden stairs to Bedfordshire as well –
Me, write Odd Odes? I am the awkward squad,
I’d rather snooze within this dingly dell.
Buzz off, you spooks. A daydream’s fit to brew:
I’d rather doze than have more truck with you..
Bill Greenwell
O, silent urn, what tales could you relate,
for you display, as in a Grecian frieze,
mortals and gods cavorting for a mate,
a static dance to soundless melodies.
’Neath leafy trees the lovers bend to kiss,
frozen in time, locked in eternal spring:
lips never meet, a perpetual near-miss,
yet, never ageing, death will have no sting.
A bovine sacrifice, a mystic priest,
what is your message, urn, to live or die?
Arresting not just death but life, while ceased
in suspended animation? Your reply:
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ – fine, although
it seems you feel that’s all I need to know
Sylvia Fairley
On the Heath and in need of a drink,
Half awake and I’m starting to think:
‘Am I dreaming I heard
An immortal bird?
This is Hampstead – I’ll go find a shrink.’
David Silverman
Misty season so mellow and fruity,
When all the world’s preggers with beauty –
You just heap more and more
On that granary floor,
While the crickets and birds sing a tutti.
George Simmers
While it’s clear beauty’s truth and truth beauty,
I’m a poet and suppose I’ve a duty
In florid, rhymed terms
To harangue Grecian urns
In a cadence sepulchrally snooty.
Adrian Fry
A Greek girl in ceramic setting
And her lad seem about to start petting,
But if you’re after porn
Your hopes will be forlorn,
Truth and beauty is all that you’re getting.
Brian Murdoch
Humanity’s all woebegone,
But you, bird, sing happily on.
Let me drink, let me die,
Let my poetry fly
Up to you, deathless bird. Oh, you’ve gone.
Nicholas Hodgson
A last Hippocrene for the road,
Then a nightingale’s melody flowed.
Was its song heard by Ruth,
Proving beauty is truth?
… Oh, wait! That’s a different Ode.
Nicholas Holbrook
No. 3394: Vernal triolet
You are invited to submit a spring triolet. Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by midday on 9 April.
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