In Competition No. 2458 you were invited to disprove Chesterton’s assertion that ‘poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese’. I meant disprove by your own efforts, not disprove historically, but either approach was acceptable. Belloc waxed lyrical on the subject in an essay, ‘In Praise of Cheese’, and the American writer Clifton Fadiman happily described it as ‘milk’s leap towards immortality’, but it was left to you to represent the poets. Among your recommendations were some strangers to me: Havarti, Geitost, Caboc (a double-cream cheese wrapped in oatmeal) and, most romantic, ‘the truckle from Appledore’. Commendations to Doris Davies. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to William Danes-Volkov.
Dreaming of cheese
And covered with fleas
Life had been hard on Ben Gunn.
Had his dreams been of chips
And his parasites thrips
He might have had some kind of fun.
But cheese as nutrition
Inspires a condition
Of loneliness when there is none.
This simple addiction
In fact (and in fiction)
Is not true for bread, cake or bun.
So give up your cheddar,
You’ll find life much better
And you won’t get marooned, like poor Gunn.
William Danes-Volkov
Poets have not had much to say of cheese
Except of course for William Robinson
(Born 1882) who spent his life
In capturing in words its high allure.
Who could forget the liquid lyric lines
In which he caught the melting of ripe Brie?
Who has not shed a patriotic tear
Over his anthem ‘Cheddar’, on its taste
With beer and pickles in an English pub?
A trip to Paris in the post-war years
Inspired his ‘Jazz sonata: Roquefort blues’,
And Dada brought perhaps his finest hour
With ‘Nothing’, on the holes in Emmental.
His great obsession had the critics stumped,
But modern scholarship has found its cause:
A boyhood passion for the dairymaid.
S.E.G. Hopkin
There are cheeses that ravage your palate,
There are cheeses you can’t taste at all.
Some cheeses deliver a heavenly shiver
And some should be thrown at the wall.
I can go for a smooth Dolcelatte.
I can bond with a ripe Neufchatel.
Both appeal to my molar, but not Cambozola —
That’s surely the hybrid from hell.
I once knew a young lady from Romford
Who, before she agreed to get nude,
Would always require a bathtub of Gruyère
In which to be gently fondued.
There are cheeses that yell for attention,
There are cheeses that hide from the law.
The species are copious, but my cheese utopia’s
A friable wedge of Roquefort.
Basil Ransom-Davies
One instinctively agrees
With Chesterton’s comment about poets ignoring cheese.
Even our better rural poets fail
To sing of edible Wensleydale,
And while wandering lonely, etc., will only give you bunions,
With cheese you at least get pickled onions.
Earth hath in fact not anything to show more fair
Than Roquefort, Brie or Camembert,
And millions of students would have preferred Milton
To have dumped Adam and Eve in favour of, say, Stilton,
And his Paradise would have been far Loster
Without Red Leicester, Cheshire or Double Gloucester.
So ring out, wild bells! — they’d ring the louder
To celebrate Edam or Gouda.
Indeed, we’d probably save a lot of trees
If poets stuck exclusively to cheese.
Brian Murdoch
An unknown on the cheese board won acclaim:
Pale amber-coloured, lightly veined with blue
In flinty rind, the cheese without a name.
A local vache was all the waitress knew.
You wouldn’t find it captured under glass
In Intermarché’s air-conditioned aisles,
Where nuanced, farm-fermented curds are sparse
While trigons of cheap Brie are ranged in piles.
It looked quite average, a wizened drum,
Dry to the touch, ammoniac to smell,
But on the diner’s palate, yum and scrum…
This was a rarity, we all could tell.
Come market day we cruised the cheese stalls, where
We chose by guesswork one that seemed the same.
It wasn’t. Pleasant enough for picnic fare,
But just another cheese without a name.
G.M. Davis
True, poets tend to silence about cheese;
Their lyric impulse can’t encompass curds,
While Yarg, Raclette, Manchego, Gouda, Bries
Don’t coax the whey-faced rhymsters into words.
No sonnets sweated out on Roquefort,
No villanelles composed around Vignotte;
Free verse on Feta? Ballades on Beaufort?
An ode to Edam? — no, I fancy not.
Heroic couplets about Camembert
Are scarce as quatrains featuring Port-Salut
Or stanzas about Stilton or Gruyère.
Sestinas never lauded Danish Blue.
Not even Cheddar tempts poetic flight,
Although round one perennial they swoon —
Eternal, rounded, wakeful through the night,
That unattainable green cheese, the moon.
D.A. Prince
No. 2461: Devil’s work
You are invited to think up Seven Deadly Virtues and to mock them in verse. Maximum 16 lines. Entries to ‘Competition No. 2461’ by 14 September.
Comments