Competition: Shorts

In Competition No. 2747 you were invited to encapsulate a well-known poem in four lines.

These digests perform a valuable service to the time-starved reader of today, and How to be Well-versed in Poetry, edited by E.O. Parrott, contains some fine examples. Who needs to plough through Chesterton’s ‘Lepanto’ when we have John Stanley Sweetman’s four-line gem: ‘Don John/ Fought on./ Gave Turks/ Works’?

Your contributions were just as good and, to judge by the flood of entries, the assignment was an addictive one. Commendations go to Robert Schechter, Michael Grosvenor Myer, Marion Shore and Tabitha Syrett., while the winners earn £7 for each entry printed.

My mood is bleak, my girlfriend’s dead,
The bird sits on Athena’s head
And croaks the same word o’er and o’er.
Why did I let him through the door?
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Raven’/Chris O’Carroll

The wedding-guest was quite distressed,
Perplexed and at a loss;
He’d heard a tale — death under sail —
But who was Albert Ross?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’/Brian Allgar

Nobody touches
One’s duchess.