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.
My song of summer, my full-throated ease,
Is innocent of an intent to lay
Before my listeners beneath the trees
A psychoactive chemical buffet.
Chris O’Carroll
O William, please! — you must not sing
In such ethereal tones.
I am no ideal faery thing,
But feathers, flesh and bones.
You say you’ve sought me far and near
But never caught a glance.
Let me explain: twice every year
I fly the skies of France,
And Jacques loves birds, as he remarks,
Served up in marinade.
That’s why, unlike those careless larks,
I seek the sombre shade.
I’m sure you have no ill intent,
But stealth is what I do.
My mocking, two-tone hoot is meant
For Jacques, and not for you.
Noel Petty
If I, a bird, may speak to you, a man,
Your state of mind gives rise to some
alarm.
I’m giving you the best advice I can.
DON’T DRINK THAT HEMLOCK: it
may do you harm.
It won’t be Lethe. It’ll be the Styx,
A one-way ticket to the terminus.
Is that your only option – down and out?
An everlasting fix
That fixes nothing? Life itself’s a plus,
And that’s what birds and poets sing about.
P.S. I said the same to Socrates.
He could have lived in Corinth at his ease.
John Whitworth
My beak aches, and I’ll sing to you no more!
John Keats, you’ve overdone the Hippocrene —
You’ve sunk not Lethe-wards, but to the
floor.
You think a nightingale’s a waking dream?
With birds Romantic poets are no good,
(Well, Byron is, though not the feathered
kind),
But for the rest of you, all hope is gone.
It’s very clear you could
Not tell a chicken from your own behind,
If it was gobbling up your alien corn.
That Shelley says a skylark’s not a bird,
And Wordsworth thinks the cuckoo’s just a
voice!
We should complain to the RSPB,
Your verse is so absurd!
Come on, you really have to face it, boys,
You’re a disgrace to ornithology.
Brian Murdoch
‘Blithe’ do you say? You silly bard!
A cuckoo’s life is bleak and hard.
A ‘blessed bird’, you say. No, Will,
They hunt us down. You see, we kill
The fledgling chicks of other birds.
‘A wandering voice’? No, Will — your
words
Are wildly wandering in these hills,
Prancing through rotting daffodils.
Get real! Look at those slaughtered sheep
That fester in a stinking heap.
You sing of babbling vales and flowers
Most people pass those ‘golden hours’
In sluggish queues of tourist cars
Or fancy shops and crowded bars.
Quite frankly, Will, you have no clue.
The daftest cuckoo here is you!
Shirley Curran
No. 2679: going for a song
You are invited to usher in the New Year with a teetotallers’ drinking song (16 lines maximum). Please email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 29 December. NB. For logistical reasons, entries must be emailed.
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