Competition: Backchat

Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition

In Competition No. 2676 you were invited to submit a reply to the poet from Wordsworth’s cuckoo or Keats’s nightingale.

A huge entry yielded an entertaining parade of stroppy birds with a fine line in put-downs. While Wordsworth took the greatest punishment (deservedly, some might say) in terms of volume, the nightingales were on especially withering form.

Everyone shone this week, but Jan D. Hodge, Catherine Tufariello, W.J. Webster, John Beaton and G.W. Tapper stood out and were unlucky losers. The winning entries, printed below, earn their authors £25 apiece; George Simmers pockets the extra five pounds.

Darkling I’ve listened, too, while you orate
About my warbling till I’ve grown quite shirty.
John, mate, I’m singing to attract a mate,
Not ‘pouring forth my soul’ — just being flirty.
That’s what birds do. You think it’s ‘rich to die’,
But we like life (and birds’ lives are not long)
So it should need no genius to know why
We sing the old old song.
A bit of life might sort your mental muddle ─
Why not hop round to Fanny’s for a cuddle?

Or hop somewhere. Those lovely female birds
Will not come near a bard-infested tree.
They want some action, not your gloopy words ─
So kindly leave me be,
To maximise my chance of jig-a-jig
Before the day when I fall off my twig.
George Simmers

You hear my voice, and hemlock’s your first
thought?
Really? That stuff that did in Socrates?
That’s how my music grabs you? Thanks a lot.
We singers swoon for poison similes.
Your Muse next serves up opiates and wine;
Though Bacchus and his pards you feign to
scorn,
You clearly love the poppy and the vine
More than Ruth ever did her alien corn.
Your tropes of toxin and inebriation
Are meant, I do not doubt, as flattery,
But I tend to prefer an adulation
That savours less of pharmacology.