Jaspistos

Miss Mealy-mouth

Miss Mealy-mouth

issue 10 December 2005

In Competition No. 2421 you were given an opening couplet of a poem, ‘I knew a girl who was so pure/ She couldn’t say the word manure’ and invited to continue for a further 16 lines.

The couplet comes from ‘A Perfect Lady’, a poem by Reginald Arkell (who he?) in The Everyman Book of Light Verse. The lady ends happily cured:

She squashes greenfly with her thumb,
And knows how little snowdrops come:
In fact, the garden she has got
Has broadened out her mind a lot.




This was the biggest entry ever. As usual in judging, when skill is equal I incline to the more original. The prizewinners, printed below, take £20 each, and Godfrey Bullard gets the extra fiver.



She spoke of ‘lady doggie’, which
Had safer resonance than ‘bitch’,
And failed to see, throughout her days,
The cruder jokes in Shakespeare’s plays.
From



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