In Competition No. 2416 you were invited to reduce the life story of a famous person or a fictional character to three limericks.
I was strict about metre and rhyme. A limerick is technically a very conventional form of poetry, and so when my ear was offended I turned my thumb down. And I was certainly not going to countenance ‘neuralgia’ rhyming with ‘Trafalgar’! A third criterion was the necessary biographical element demanded by ‘life story’. Iain Crawford wrote tellingly about John Lennon, but spleen overwhelmed history. Commendations to him, Bernadette Evans, Brian Murdoch and Dominica Roberts. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver is Colin Sydenham’s.
At his birth he was maimed and then spurned,
But soon saved and adopted. He learned
He was fated to slay
His papa; straightaway
His face from his homeland he turned.
On the road an old toff made a scene,
So he casually topped the has-been,
Then freed Thebes of her jinx
By outsmarting the Sphinx;
His reward was the hand of the queen.
But destiny none can avoid,
The denouement our hero destroyed:
For the toff was his pa,
The queen his mamma.
His tale was a godsend to Freud.
Colin Sydenham
From the days of his studious youth
Sherlock Holmes was the ultimate sleuth,
An eccentric, unique
Kind of genius geek
Analytically hunting the truth.
‘The game’s afoot, Watson!’ he’d hoot.
‘Fetch down Bradshaw and find us a route.’
No assassin or thief
Stood a chance of relief
With the doctor and Holmes in pursuit.
Holmes brought to unequalled perfection
The whole science and art of detection,
And though tragically drowned
Was predictably bound
To be granted a swift resurrection.
G.M. Davis
The elegant Mrs Karenin
Encounters her destiny when in
A station, and fails
To stay on the rails
(No wife should admit other men in).
One Vronsky, a handsome young captain,
She soon becomes fatally wrapped in;
A shocking affair
Of love and despair,
Which Vronsky begins to feel trapped in.
His passion appears on the wane;
She longs for her son, but in vain …
Since everything fails
She goes back on the rails
And perishes under a train.
Mary Holtby
For Austen’s young heroine, Emma,
One’s feelings admit a dilemma:
Her motives seem high
But her vision’s awry —
Like Knightley, we love but condemn ’er.
A self-confessed maker of matches,
So daft are the plots that she hatches
(While quite unaware
Of a secretive pair)
She muffs all her putative ‘catches’.
From wrongly appraising to rightly,
From mocking to treating politely,
She learns about life
And is groomed as a wife
By the trainer par excellence, Knightley.
Grani de Morgan
The Rector of Stiffkey’s delight
Was rescuing girls of the night.
Returning one day
From one such foray,
He skipped the Remembrance Day rite.
His bishop responded
with shrieks,
And got him unfrocked within weeks.
Deprived of his pay,
He went on display
In a barrel with Blackpool’s sad freaks.
Like Daniel, he preached in the den
Of the lion the circus had then,
But he trod on its tail.
Thus ceased his travail
For ever and ever. Amen.
Noel Petty
A haughty young madam, Miss Havisham,
Spinster of (somewhere near) Faversham,
Planned to get hitched
But was cruelly ditched
By a cad who wooed women to ravish ’em.
Bent on destroying men’s power,
She brought up a girl to be sour.
Her name was Estella
And Pip was the fella
Estella was groomed to devour.
Years later Miss Havisham’s mission
Had seemingly come to fruition
When flames from the fire
Consumed her attire
And led to her decomposition.
Alan Millard
No. 2419: Food for thought
You are invited to supply a poem in free verse (maximum 16 lines) beginning, ‘I think continually of …’ Entries to ‘Competition No. 2419’ by 17 November.
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