Lucy Vickery

Brow lines

issue 07 December 2019

In Competition No. 3127 you were invited to submit Shakespeare’s newly discovered ‘Woeful ballad to his mistress’ eyebrows’, as referred to by Jaques in As You Like It (‘And then the lover,/ Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad/ Made to his mistress’ eyebrow…’). For the purposes of this challenge, a ballad could be any sort of poem (most of you wrote sonnets) and anachronisms were allowed. The prizewinners, in another fiercely contested week, take £20.
 

What blessing crowns thy outward loveliness?
A coiffed, enrapturing head of sable hair
That blazes rank above the common press.
Yet there is hair invisible elsewhere.
Those secret, curling wisps that underlie
Thy gorgeous panoply of silk and lace
Intemperately appear to my mind’s eye,
Prompting low stirrings in another place.
 
Then as I spur my mind to higher things,
I worship at thy temple, where twin arcs,
As softly supple as the downy wings
Of fledgling finches, flaunt the swooping marks
Of grace and beauty both.












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