In Competition No. 2892 you were invited to submit an irregular quatrain in which you bring together two people from the world of the arts and then add a couplet describing the consequences.
Two competitors paired Tolkien and Graham Greene, with not dissimilar results. Here’s D.A. Prince:
If J.R.R. Tolkien
Met Graham Greene
Would a hobbit’s story
Become The Power and The Glory?
And take two from Virginia Price-Evans:
Had J.R.R. Tolkien
Met Graham Greene,
The Hobbit’s lair
Might have been the end of the affair.
Other popular couplings included Wendy Cope and Alexander Pope; Salvador Dalì and Bob Marley; Horace and William Morris; and Mel Gibson and Henrik Ibsen. This one drew the crowds and the volume of witty entries made judging extremely difficult. The winners below take £8 per quatrain.
If Charlotte Brontë
had played Beatrice to Dante
might the fruit of their epic affair
have been Dante’s literary Eyre?
If Ogden Nash
had written songs for Johnny Cash
the lyrics might have turned out stronger
but the line Johnny walked would have been a whole lot longer.
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