Patchwork quilt

The scissors-and-paste work involved in this, though laborious, is easy enough; what is difficult is to avoid sliding into nonsense. The trick is, in Dryden’s phrase, to ‘deviate into sense’ as often as possible. John C.H. Mounsey began promisingly: ‘I met a traveller from an antique land,/ A cricket cap was on his head./ “Hold off! Unhand me, grey-beard loon!/ Charge for the guns!” he said’, but lost the plot afterwards. Coincidence corner: two of you used the first line of ‘Ozymandias’ as an opener, and two others did the same with ‘Boys and girls, come out to play’. What are the odds against that? The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each, and the bonus fiver goes to Richard Ellis, who took fair advantage of dispensing with rhyme.

Oft in the stilly night
Ere on my bed my limbs I lay
I think continually of those who were truly great:
About Miss Edith Gee,
Her little loose hands, and drooping Victorian shoulders:
Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee;
Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant,
A heavily-built Falstaffian man
Thundering for money at a poet’s door:
He was not of an age, but for all time;
Job Davies, eighty-five,
An old, mad, blind, despised and dying King,
Yet on he fares, by my own heart inspired.
I