Competition | 13 December 2008

In Competition No. 2574 you were invited to take a poem, or a fragment of a poem, and anagrammatise it to make a new poem. Some of you were unsure exactly what it was I was after. I was asking you to break down a poem, or part of it, into its constituent letters and rearrange those letters to make a new poem.

Judging by the unprecedentedly low turnout, and by some of your comments, this was a daunting assignment. ‘If only one had nothing else to do!’ wrote Mary Holtby; while Basil Ransome-Davies expressed the hope that the comp was as hard to adjudicate as it was to do. Well, I was prepared to share your pain, Basil, but was spared, thanks to a technologically able well-wisher, who came up with a computer program for checking anagrams.

I awarded points for accuracy, obviously. But those who managed to carve a decent poem out of such limiting material got bonus marks — especially when it related cleverly to the original.