Paradise Lost in four lines

In Competition No. 3163 you were invited to submit well-known poems encapsulated in four lines.

Now that the internet has all but destroyed our attention spans, who has the mental wherewithal to plough through Paradise Lost or The Faerie Queene?

Well, thanks to the cracking four-liners below, you don’t have to. Props to David Harris, who boiled all of Shakespeare’s sonnets down to a single quatrain, and to -Philip Roe’s impressively pithy two-line version of that charmer Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’: ‘We’ll soon be dead/ So come to bed’. Honourable mentions go to unlucky runners–up Martin Brinkworth, Richard Woods, Neil Crockford, Bill Morris, Brian Miller, Penelope Mackie, and Richard Spencer. The winners are rewarded with £8 each.

It’s distressing me, Dad,That you’ll shortly be dead,Yet refuse to get mad.Don’t just lie there in bed.Chris O’Carroll/‘Do not go gentle into that good night’

Train stopped.Wonder why.Nothing happened.Nice sky.Dorothy Pope/‘Adlestrop’

Satan found himself in hell —Eve and Adam also fell —Good gone bad got even worse —Milton wrote too much blank verse —Jane Blanchard/Paradise Lost

foreplay(more play)errings, ummings(and cummings)Martin Parker/‘may i feel said he’

Play cricket with a schoolboy heartThat’s true.