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Douglas G. Brown, David Silverman, Martin Parker and Ralph la Rosa shone in a large and varied entry but were narrowly outflanked by the winners below who take £25 apiece. G.M. Davis pockets the extra fiver.
Vers libre nourished my career.
I tilled eclectic ground
By turns elated and austere
A gallon of Walt Whitman here
And there a whiff of Pound.
I thought of rhyme as quite passé,
A foolish game of crambo,
The plodding mode of yesterday.
For Tennyson it was okay,
But I was Arthur Rimbaud.
Yet from the coffin in due time
Rhyme sprang up like a zombie.
A rhyming dico was the prime
Response from me, and now I rhyme
Like Lascelles Abercrombie
G.M. Davis
I wish I’d never had the sudden urge
To read a rhymester’s dictionary through:
Now all words are lysergic, and no purge
Cures this affliction. Fiction? Very true:
I’m consciously constructing all my verses
So that, apart from echo, nothing matters —
Each ode as odd and ivied as a thyrsus
(The cone-tipped staff of Bacchus and his satyrs).
Diviners swear I’m going crackers, bonkers,
As fancy, rhabdomancy, both pursue me.
My breathing seethes and rattles (I’ve a rhonchus).
It’s plumy; I am gloomy; eyes are rheumy.
Where once I bubbled like Osaka Pepsi,
Or crack accordions lifting Cajun boozers,
Now I am troubled with a narcolepsy:
Alack, my audience drifts in raging snoozes.
Bill Greenwell
I learnt that there’s a rhyming word for silver
And other so-called rhymeless words like orange;
It turns out that a female lamb’s a chilver,
And there’s a certain hill in Wales named
Blorenge.
As synthesizer has been docked to synth
And a horse’s rump is also called its curple,
I found my verse need not be baulked by plinth,
My couplets could heroically cope with purple.
Then felt I like some watcher in the dark
Of night, who saw, in 1957,
The very first of all the sputniks arc
Its point of light across the starry heaven,
And thought of Ike, his spacecraft thus outdone,
Silent, no doubt from pique, in Washington.
Ray Kelley
Much have I dabbled in the realm of rhyme,
And seen the art of poets who have found
Inspiring ways to use half-echoed sound
To frame a scheme where form and feeling chime.
And yet how great a fall from the sublime,
From lofty peak to mean and stony ground,
If bards so Apollonian, so renowned
Had used this tool to save them thought and time.
Dear God! could anyone who values verse
Have wits so lame that they should need this
crutch?
Is idleness the fault or is it worse —
The need to have another’s hand to clutch?
The book’s the Devil’s work, a printed curse,
Which far from looking into, none should touch.
W.J. Webster
The purists claimed that RhymeZone was a
crime zone,
A cheating waste-of-time zone, a sub-prime zone,
But, sick of the abusive Muse’s ruses
(The mind games that she chooses blow my fuses)
I picked it, clicked it, found it just the ticket.
So stick it, those who think it isn’t cricket:
A poet needs assistance from a distance
Whose gift is less consistent than was Wystan’s,
Who struggles like an ugly punch-drunk slugger
While juggling with the language. What a bugger.
But RhymeZone makes it easy as it frees me
From queasy fears that used to seize and freeze me.
Its array of homophonics is as colourful as onyx,
As complete as home colonics, as sublime as gin
and tonics —
Woo-hoo! Oh man, it’s handy and it’s fun.
Now I can rhyme I’m manically planning to take
Scanning 101.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Much sought I books by Dick and Tom and Harry,
Until I found the Rhyming Dictionary,
And now, despite what anybody says
I even have a rhyme for ‘stout Cortez’,
Nor shall I in the future have to chance
To that device which men call assonance,
Which sets out for a rhyme, but misses it.
I can dismiss it in a hissy fit,
And henceforth imitate poetic greats
Who knew all about rhyme, like Keats — no,
Yeats,
Nor need we strain, but let Cole Porter train us
At rhyming ‘heinous’ with ‘Coriolanus’,
While yet Tom Lehrer’s skills, so high and wide,
Let us rhyme ‘try and hide’ and ‘cyanide’.
Just one thing’s strange, and makes one whinge or
cringe:
Why is there no real ear-rhyme for ‘orange’?
Brian Murdoch
You are invited to supply a poem reflecting on the Nativity written from the point of view of the donkey or the ox who (according to artists’ portrayals of the event, at least) bore witness to it (16 lines maximum). Please email entries, wherever possible, to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 30 November. The short deadline is because of the Christmas printing schedule.
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