Complimentary

In Competition No. 2439 you were invited to write a poem in praise of a friend.
The only time I wrote a poem in praise of a friend, he shortly afterwards committed murder, followed by suicide. There are, though, much happier examples. Pope’s ‘On a Certain Lady at Court’ ends:

‘Has she no faults then,’ Envy says, ‘Sir?’
Yes, she has one, I must aver;
When all the World conspires to praise her,
The Woman’s deaf, and does not hear.

The compliment is spiced by the fact that she actually was deaf. I also like Day Lewis’s poem ‘For Rex Warner on his 60th Birthday’, which contains the shrewd line, ‘“Keeping up” a friendship means it is through.’ It was a pleasant change to set a ‘joking apart’ comp which couldn’t possibly embrace political satire. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and D.A. Prince takes the bonus fiver.
In our last issue the number of the competition set was misprinted as 2443.