Spectator competition: compose some wintry nonsense

Our competition this week invites you to submit nonsense verse on a wintry theme.

The line between sense and nonsense is a blurred one. In his Spectator review of Geoffrey Grigson’s Faber anthology of nonsense verse, Anthony Burgess encapsulated this nicely, noting that Mr Grigson ‘wisely evades, in his preface, anything like a definition of nonsense. He knows that we will only know what nonsense is when we know the nature of sense. Nonsense is something we think we can recognise, just as we think we can recognise poetry, but there has to be an overlap with what we think we can recognise as sense.’

A good way to get yourself in the right frame of mind for this challenge might be to remind yourself of the genius of Carroll or Lear.

Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 27 November.

Last week’s assignment asked competitors to supply a school essay or poem written at the age of eight by a well-known figure, living or dead, entitled ‘My Pet’.

Those of you who chose to step into the childhood shoes of well-known writers faced the tricky challenge of pulling off an element of pastiche while at the same time producing something that could plausibly have been written by an eight-year-old.