The mod acrostic

In Competition No. 2482 you were invited to supply an acrostic poem, involving questions and answers in which the first letters of the lines read SOCRATIC METHOD.

Smartypants will have spotted that the title of this competition is an anagram of the required phrase. In hospital one undergoes much questioning as well as treatment. The other day a nurse with a clipboard asked me, ‘Are you apprehensive in this hospital?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why?’ she inquired. ‘Aren’t most people in hospital apprehensive, because they’re ill but they don’t know how ill?’ ‘Oh,’ she said most un-Socratically, ‘that was rather a silly question, wasn’t it?’ ‘Yes.’

Commendations to Paul Griffin and Frank Mc Donald. Prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to G.M. Davis.

Should art be autotelic, or for use?

Only for pleasure; all else would be abuse.

Can it not point us to the wise and good?

Rarely — and there’s no reason why it should.

An artist, then, may lack a moral sense?

Too true — and there’s an alp of evidence.

Is Matthew Arnold not a guiding light?

Call him instead a kind of Prozac-lite.

Must culture only be a panacea?

Ethics are for the tastes of yesteryear.

Then appetites are all you recognise?

Hedonic jouissance is what I prize.

Oh, is there nothing that can lift your soul?

Decidedly: sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.

G.M. Davis

‘So, how do you, a virtuous person, place,

Ordered as to usefulness to you,

Cunning, meanness, benevolence and grace?’

‘Reluctantly I’ll grant that the first two

Are needed daily, but I am afraid

The others that you list are, to be frank,

Impractical for someone in my trade.’

‘Can this be true? — that you, whose trusted bank

Manages my money, do not most

Earnestly prize virtues such as these

To match the probity of which you boast?’

‘However much you speak like Socrates,

Overdrafts are not available this week,

Despite your philosophical technique.’

Hugh King

So Tony Blair is going very soon?

Only when he judges it opportune.