Competition: Cheesy Feat

In Competition No. 2672 you were invited to disprove G.K. Chesterton’s assertion that the poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. In his essay ‘The Poet and the Cheese’ Chesterton himself takes steps to put this right, penning a sonnet to a Stilton cheese, which, as he acknowledges, contains ‘echoes’ of another well known poem:

Stilton, thou shouldst be living at this hour
And so thou art. Nor losest grace thereby;
England has need of thee, and so have I —
She is a Fen. Far as the eye can scour…

Ray Kelley, John Whitworth and George Simmers were unlucky losers, and while I was impressed by Clementine Travers’s Whitman pastiche the bonus fiver goes to Noel Petty by a whisker. His fellow winners pocket £30 each.

Lord bless you, Ma’am! We poets aim to please —
What Charles Lamb did for pork we’ll do for
cheese.

Let’s say a simple Frankish dairymaid
Was so besotted of her royal master
She was distracted from her lowly trade
And left the milk to curdle. A disaster!
But, testing if the mess was fit to eat,
She found she’d chanced upon a peerless treat.

The Kaiser, passing by, and in no haste,
Sampled a piece, and with a look serene
Baptised it Käse for its royal taste,
And took the dairymaid to be his Queen.
The name of Cheese spread North, West, South
and East
And sets the final seal on every feast.

We’ll add some spice to this folkloric brew,
Then Wikipedia it to make it true.
Noel Petty

I sing of processed American cheese, the glory of
these States,
Factory sliced and shredded by white-apron’d
workers clean and strong,
But I do not decline to feast also on the cheeses
of Europe.
See me at the reception, hovering over the hors
d’oeuvres,
Consuming a great wheel of Cheddar golden and
glowing as the sun,
Making short work of the snowy-rinded Brie,
Gobbling up every crumb of the Morbier and its
layer of smoky ash,
Devouring the blue mold of Roquefort, and
Gouda with its crimson wax.