Competition | 3 July 2010

In Competition No. 2653 you were invited to submit a poem, written in the metre of Longfellow’s ‘The Song of Hiawatha’, describing Hiawatha’s experiences at his computer. Longfellow’s epic, with its readily imitated metre, has spawned countless parodies. This is from the Literary Digest in 1925: ‘Have you ever noticed verses/ Written in unrhymed trochaics/ Without thinking as you read them,/ This was swiped from “Hiawatha”?’ And in an introduction (written in trochees) to his fine contribution to the genre, ‘Hiawatha’s photographing’, Lewis Carroll made the following observation: ‘In an age of imitation, I can claim no special merit for this slight attempt at doing what is known to be so easy. Any fairly practised writer, with the slightest ear for rhythm, could compose, for hours together, in the easy running metre of “The Song of Hiawatha”.’

So this was not an especially testing assignment — technically speaking, at least. While Ann Drysdale, Martin Parker, G.M Davis and Jane Dards were impressive, those that shone most brightly content-wise are printed below and win £25 each. Basil Ransome-Davies pockets the bonus fiver.

Where the apple sheds its blossom
Where the Meikro softly splashes
At the keyboard of a laptop
In the shadow of his tepee
Howling oaths and imprecations
Not becoming to his status
As of some drink-maddened paleface
As of badly tutored children
Hiawatha spent the morning
Keen to bring to mind his password
Trying different combinations
Trying hard but always failing
Thus his face grew ever redder
Thus his eyeballs bulged like planets
Till he pulverised his laptop
Cursing still the white man’s magic
Basil Ransome-Davies

Glitchy software made him gloomy,
But his mission lay before him:
At an antiquated laptop,
On a modem that was dial-up,
To defeat the website filter
That his granny had installed there;
To mark ‘login’ box, then ‘password’
Like the pale bark of the birch-tree
With his art of picture-writing,
So his friend request could reach her —
Minnie H.