Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: deflationary couplets

‘I wondered lonely as a cloud/ And uttered filthy thoughts aloud.’ Credit: rgbspace

In Competition No. 3173 you were invited to give a fresh twist to a well-known single line of poetry by adding a line of your own to it.

This was a wildly popular competition, and my inbox was flooded with entries. Many of you were thinking along the same lines, which produced a fair amount of duplication. There were lots of variations on this topical adaptation of Wordsworth, courtesy of John Priestland: ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud,/ As household mixing’s not allowed.’ And on this new slant on Milton, from Iain Morley — ‘Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new/To tear them up for dear old HS2.’ D.A. Prince’s take on Yeats — ‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree/ In case the Government decrees that we must be Tier Three’ — was echoed frequently elsewhere in the entry.

The winners, printed below, pocket a fiver per couplet.

I wandered lonely as a cloudAnd uttered filthy thoughts aloud.Basil Ransome-Davies/Wordsworth

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.She slapped his face and told him not to stare. They also serve who only stand and waitAnd get the sack because their trains run late.Chris O’Carroll/St Vincent Millay/Milton

Hope is the thing with feathers. (Not lust, that’s whips and leathers.) Janine Beacham/Dickinson

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness painsWhen Uncle Jim, who ‘spots’ them, speaks of trains. A book of Verses underneath the BoughIs badly smeared with pigeon droppings now. I travelled among unknown menBut shall not vote Lib Dem again.Adrian Fry/Keats/Khayyam/Wordsworth

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,And pick my way through the litter-strewn shore, as turds go floating by.Janet Adams/Masefield

The sure extinction that we travel toIs better than the year we’ve just been through.Max Gutmann/Larkin

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,Though doggie-style’s my favourite these days.G.M.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in