In Competition No. 2917 you were invited to submit a reply from Andrew Marvell’s coy mistress.
Marvell’s mix of cajoling wit and harsher truths failed to persuade the Australian (male) poet A.D. Hope. Here’s an extract from his blistering reply, ‘His Coy Mistress to Mr Marvell’, published in 1978:
Had you addressed me in such terms
And prattled less of graves and worms,
I might, who knows, have warmed to you;
But, as things stand, must bid adieu
The contemporary American poet Annie Finch wasn’t having any of it either. Her equally stinging riposte begins: ‘Sir, I am not a bird of prey:/ a Lady does not seize the day.’
The entry was satisfyingly inventive — Philip Roe, Nick Grace, Martin John, John O’Byrne and Stanley McDermott III were especially good. The winners, printed below, earn £25 each and Robert Schechter snaffles the extra fiver.
Were you but Earth’s last-standing man
I might agree that life’s short span,
Combined with all you’ve rightly said
Regarding how we’ll soon be dead,
Would be persuasive we should screw.
But there are better men than you.
No woman likes a man who begs
In rhyme to get between her legs.
(It seems so desperate, don’t you think?
You might just buy a girl a drink.)
What’s more, the gossips all report
That other things than life are short,
And I prefer, I must admit,
My men to have a tighter fit.
Robert Schechter
Andrew, get this: it’s not OK
To harass women in this way
The world’s moved on and now disgust
Is all you’ll get for public lust.
My body’s mine, and so’s my time
And not for you to grope in rhyme.
You think this attitude is ‘quaint’?
Facebook agrees with me: it ain’t.
Now on your track there’s a whole swarm,
A veritable Twitter-storm.
D’you know your sexist lines will be
Online for all eternity?
No desert, no remotest cave
Can keep you private, nor the grave.
And don’t go lab’lling me a prude:
Your wormy poem’s — frankly — rude.
D.A. Prince
No bullshitters like poets, Mother said,
They’ll lie like thieves to get into your pants.
Dressing a horny itch up as romance.
The high-flown eloquence leads to the bed.
Yours is a cunning angle, I’ll admit:
If I deny you, I deny myself
The pleasures hyped by your flamboyant wit
To end, intact and shrivelled, on the shelf.
This pretty piece of blackmail you create
In playful couplets aims to make me fall
For Mr Irresistible, but wait —
I may be coy to you, yet not to all.
This lady knows the score. She plays the field.
She services the gentry, and they love it.
Great wealth affords a more substantial yield
Than fanciful erotic thrills; so shove it.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Had I but time I’d list, brash bard,
All reasons for my disregard
Of your ‘now let us sport us’ plea.
But try these: you’ve insulted me
With ‘coy’ (when coyness I despise)
And then with ‘mistress’, which implies
Yours and yours only is the suit
To weigh, since other men are mute.
No doubt you found it marvellous fun
To pen that crude ‘quaint honour’ pun
After the threat of ‘worms that try’
What I’ve preserved and set store by.
Your ‘amorous birds’ are ‘birds of prey’;
That, sir, is a dead giveaway
Of what your loveplay would be like.
So here’s my answer: on your bike!
Ray Kelley
You urge me headlong into bed
With warnings that we’ll soon be dead:
‘Dear lady, hurry, lift your skirt
Ere we are six feet deep in dirt!’
I wonder, does that seem to you
The most propitious way to woo?
Do visions of decomposition
Arouse most women to coition?
Let love be, rather than rough strife
And flight from death, a dance with life.
A timeless idyll in the sun
Is sweeter than a panting run,
For we will never truly taste
What we devour in anxious haste.
Your morbid, frantic, breathless chase
Won’t gain my finest private place.
Chris O’Carroll
’Tis bold of you, my dear, sweet boy
To condescend to call me coy.
Might my resistance not be just
A parry to your thrusting lust?
Why think that conj’ring graveyard worms
Will sooner make me come to terms
With what you will — and I will not?
To know that we must some day rot
Is not a thought to make thy bed
Appealing to my heart or head.
The hurrying chariot that you hear
Has Eros as its charioteer
Whose instant urges you would slake
While planting your triumphant stake;
But mine’s a Vestal inner voice
That whispers what attends my choice.
W.J. Webster
No 2920: rocker to writer
Morrissey is the latest rock star to branch out into fiction. You are invited to submit a sample from a novel written by a rock musician of your choosing. Please email entries of up to 150 words to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 14 October.
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